[adhesive_wombat]

> Looking at the jQuery source code, it manages a lot of edge cases that I don't really have time to figure out on my own.

Reminds me of the warning about rewriting old "messy" codebases. I am paraphrasing, but the upshot was "You know what those weird and ugly bits of code are? They're bug fixes, and they were earned through sweat and blood and years over a period of many, many years."