A year or two, I would have agreed with you. However, I've been working on a new project in D3 over the past month and I've realized that it now has so many mat

A year or two, I would have agreed with you. However, I've been working on a new project in D3 over the past month and I've realized that it now has so many mature, built-in visualization layouts that almost anything you'd want to do can be done out of the box with a little bit of tweaking. See, for example, the layouts in https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Layouts https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Layouts (which include a pretty tree layout) as well as the axis/timeseries handling built into d3.scale/time/svg. Granted if you're doing a completely new visualization, you're going to have to do a lot of custom stuff, but there are a LOT of helpers built in these days. The biggest learning hump for me was understanding the way data is bound to DOM elements, and how a mismatch between the data and the selected DOM elements is handled. I never really understood until I read Mike Bostock's post "Thinking With Joins", at which point I attained d3 enlightenment: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/join/ edit: not to mention the growing library of user-made d3 plugins at https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins