> Except drag and drop and Ajax. Those are terrible.

And except actual DOM manipulation which is tedious, error-prone, and requires tons of boilerplate.

> I also preferred PrototypeJS over jQuery, its approach of extending objects made way more sense than a god object that wrapped itself around my existing objects.

Prototype extended global objects which made them even more magic and would break vanilla JS. jQuery creates a wrapper object with well-defined methods and lets you access the actual unaltered underlying DOM object.

And their resulting APIs are not that different

   // Prototype
   $('comments').addClassName('active').show()

   // jQuery
   $('#comments').addClass('active').show()