What exactly would you miss (other than some utilities like each(), which are I would like to keep out of the library)?

Actually one of the ways I used to decide what features to squeeze in was making a list of all jQuery functions and re-implementing the functionality with Minified. To make sure that I don't miss anything important.

There are some things that are more complicated to do, because you need to work with anonymous functions, but honestly most of them were functions that I had never heard of before and would probably have re-implemented even when using jQuery :)

By the way ... one big use case I'm seeing for jQuery replacements lately is being a drop-in replacement for BackBone apps, since they need just a tiny fraction of jQuery's capabilities but do carry around all it's weight for no particularly good reason.

I'm not sure if Minified.js qualifies for that, but if it does you should definitely make a bigger point of that ;)

Sizzle is actually a big one, CSS1 doesn't really cut it for anything but the most trivial use cases, although if you're only targeting modern browsers than I guess you can rely on their support.

Also, if you don't support each, I assume you don't support method chaining on enumerables?

As for actual missing features, the jQuery data stuff is really useful, but if the intention is to use minified with something like backbone, I guess it's kinda moot.

EDIT: I forgot to say nice library and I like the source code too.

My replacement for more advanced CSS features are the methods filter(), sub() and collect(). For example, instead of $('li:odd') you would write $('li').filter(function(v, index) { return index%2;}). But, admittedly, if you are well-versed in those advanced CSS features, they will always be easier to use.

You can chain list methods, as in $('li').filter(function(v, index) { return index%2;}).set({$backgroundColor: '#000'}).animate({$backgroundColor: '#fff'}) to fade every second list element from black to white. The number of collection functions is limited to a minimum though. The Util module will add a lot more collection features (but at a cost of another 4kb).

Yes, that's true, data() is something I intentionally omitted because I don't think that it's worth its bytes today. For simple lower level effects toggle() offers a very different approach of handling state, and for larger apps you should use a MVC framework, as you suggested.

Thats what I was asking lol :) When I look at that list it seems like it covers most of what I do, was just curious.

Like "jquery gives you all of this, do you really use all of it?"

I suppose it's a bad sign when we are using jquery blindly and not really knowing what all that includes..