[csytan]

Great write up! I've been working with maps lately and this was a very interesting read.

I've tried the Leaflet SVG layer and it can become quite slow when loaded with thousands of points.

Another approach would be to use a custom SVG layer overlay using CSS Transforms. I've used an SVG overlay with D3 and it was much faster at panning and zooming. It could handle ~30k points (and lots of lines) without a problem on my laptop.

Edit + an example: http://i.imgur.com/ey8YDWJ.jpg