[ryanmarsh]

I don't intend to diminish the hard work you put into this. It looks clean and useable. Congratulations.

If you (people in general) are using d3 for simple charts you are doing it wrong.

d3 is a visualization library. It excels at helping you make non-trivial things. For the trivial there are some great chart libraries such as Highcharts. I build visualizations at work and for those I use d3. Whenever I need something as simple as a stacked area chart I simply use Excel or Highcharts. Everytime I've tried to use Highcharts for a complex viz, or d3 for a simple chart, it's been a waste of time. I've used NVD3 as well as some other D3 based charting packages. None of them are as simple as Excel or Highcharts IMHO.

[clintonb]

Highcharts is amazing, but it is not distributable with open source software. My team at edX recently migrated away from Highcharts to nvd3 for this very reason. The state of charting is such that good packages are expensive. There are some mediocre packages for free. D3 is the only package we found that met our needs.

[cjfont]

Using D3 for simple charts is not necessarily a waste of time -- I have a small collection of code for D3 charts I've made that I keep around and reuse as needed. Although they are simple they are tailored to the way I like simple charts to look like.