Status update:
I’ve mostly abandoned the idea to force empty space into the graph to illustrate time. This provides very little long-term incentive to work on the project. What proved much more exciting is pouring in more and more data to increase the overall complexity and density. This, unsurprisingly, lead to the same performance issues I had with the forced ranks.
I didn’t want to get into stitching, but it still seemed like the right-long term approach to split the workload. As my dataset grew, and now spans 200 years, it made sense to split the work for user/developer experience reasons. Being able to produce defined slices as graphs is tremendously useful and opens up new paths of thinking.
I also had to build a viewer experience, to make navigation in the large SVG a bit easier. So attention is constantly being split up between several areas of development 