I mean, you're always going to run into this problem with this kind of library. Building a big, complex data visualisation pretty much requires expert knowledge in whatever language/environment you're doing it in. Law of Leaky Abstractions and all that. The purpose of something like d3 isn't to hide everything from a newbie, it's to make the code a bit cleaner and save the expert developer a bit of time. I think beginner programmers in general expect too much from libraries.