Just on the surface the potential for the minified library with its reduced size and browser support sounds great. In just checking a few features it seems as though the performance doesn't line up with jquery atm. In a large application space would I rather trade off js performance for saving initial DL time (cache)? I start to wonder where diminishing returns set in, if I should I really care about IE6 anymore or if the clean and simple API you say won't change will in fact never change.

http://jsperf.com/test-jquery-vs-minified

And to the community at large, feel free to add more tests.