You would not want a Framework/ORM that abstracts alter statements from you when working with large tables in a relational db. Alter statements can have real performance interruption and is something that an engineer has to be aware of. It's a case where a framework might help 70% of the use cases but really hurt the other 30% with medium-larger sized tables.
I have had similar experience. Skipping jquery and calling native DOM methods directly can be surprisingly fast.
Still I am curious in what the benchmarks actually say. The native DOM methods appear to return before rendering is done (at least in webkit). So when we get a 200ms benchmark for 10,000 divs I suspect there it is taking a longer than that to fully render.
Yeah, they do return before rendering is done. For example, this fiddle[1] inserts 100k svg circles; it takes 1000 milliseconds on my machine, but scrolling around takes several seconds.
