I did a lot of work on HNES for performance, and most of it was assigning meaning to HN's markup. I don't know if it's intentionally opaque or what, but this is just the way it is. The javascript and the html are bound together.

It's terse and effective, I suppose, but it was really interesting measuring pixels to judge comment nesting.

The JS itself is fine. It's the markup that's a mess.