[tcgarvin]

Longtime D3 (even Protovis) user here. I think you're very correct in that D3 itself is not a good choice for "a simple chart or graph". If that's all I needed, I'd stick with HighCharts, or ggplot, or any of dozens of other libraries that do simple charts well, and often with a lot more batteries included. My unsolicited advice would be to consider staying away from D3 until you need it.

But if you're doing anything remotely bespoke, with any sort of custom interaction or transition, or anything in which you need to multiplex several datasets in a single set of visualizations, this toolkit is hard to beat.

My favorite personal D3 use case so far is modified animated scatter plots/beeswarms using force layouts. Immortalized for me in the "Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal" ( https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012... ), I've found that set of techniques useful for visualizing business processes in my own work over the years.

I've yet to encounter anything else that comes close to enabling those kinds of data visualizations. It's the "funky abstractions" some folks have trouble with that enable me to swap out X or Y scales with intuitive animations by literally replacing a single object and then re-invoking an idempotent render() function. Working with D3 is the most productive I've ever been in my life from a data visualization standpoint, and I suspect that will continue to be the case for some years.