I'll bite and make the argument here about using jQuery for something a decent dev should be able to implement in native JS: consistency and cross-browser suppo

I'll bite and make the argument here about using jQuery for something a decent dev should be able to implement in native JS: consistency and cross-browser support. Most of the time, I'll reach for jQ because it's so widely used that most of the weird edge-cases are ironed out, and I can be fairly confident that it'll work decently well across most modern-ish browsers. I'm sure there are exceptions, but this has been my experience. If a performance issue comes up and a jQ method is the culprit, I'll optimize that little bit. Until then, I'll use $.extend() instead of whipping it up myself, since I usually have more urgent things to do.