[braveyellowtoad]

You seem to know quite a bit about this, do you know why there isn't some sort of a "compile" phase where the jquery examples wouldn't be translated into the minimum js equivalent? Seems like then you could get the same syntax and minimum size.

[arp242]

You mean translating jQuery to "native JS"? I suppose it's possible, but I don't know if anyone built anything for it.

All I know is that you can build a custom jQuery build with grunt, as described in their README, which is what I do. I mostly use JavaScript as if the last ten years didn't happen, so I'm hardly an expert on any of this :-)