Just curious: what in particular do you hate about it?

I find it to be very confusing and difficult to do very complicated things with. You have methods like position, or height, or width that all deal with the element. But size deals with the size of the collection and not the element. There are multiple ways to add events/delegate events and some are frowned upon in favor of others. The plugin system doesn't allow you to make reference to the instance of the plugin (without what seems to be a hack), I really dislike the fact that you have to constantly wrap element in the jQuery object, even if they exist in a collection inside of a jQuery object, and I just dislike how it uses argument overloading for most of its methods (sometimes its an obj literal, sometimes it can be a string, if its a string then the args found in the obj liters go in this order after the string, etc)

But like I said, I would rather use it than have to come up with a bunch of cross browser supported js on my own. The guys behind the lib are clearly JavaScript rockstars :) while I am fan. I just find the lib's api and general approach to problem solving to be a bit wonky and dont really understand "the ease of use" that everyone touts it having.

what's the problem with using the jquery selector? i mean you can always just assign objects to a variable like:

var elemt = $('#elementID')

and then you can call something like elemt.hide() or whatever.