[colemorrison]

Progressing as a professional software engineer? Who says that's the goal? What defines a professional? Being able to reinvent the wheel to be a couple of milliseconds faster than one that exists?

No, jQuery may not be around forever...but then again browsers might not be around forever. Should one be completely dependent on jQuery? Probably not. But should one discount the level of genius that's been input into something like jQuery? Sure, if you think that you can write something better than their team. And that brings me to my main point:

jQuery isn't just "Easier." In most cases, it's BETTER.

"Oh but I can write in ajax functionality that's faster/ follows standards/ etc."

Great, but while the edge case dev is doing that 100 others have released their product. And I honestly doubt that whatever the edge case developer has written is THAT much better than what the jQuery team has written.

The best software engineers, especially in a high-paced entrepreneur role, GET SHIT DONE.