(Author of DataTables here) Thanks! There are some fantastic plug-ins out there, such as qTip, ColorBox, jqGrid, SlickGrid and many many others. Personally I take great pride in trying to maintain useful, up-to-date documentation, a large battery of unit tests and just generally trying to make the software as useful as possible, for the job that it is intended to do.
So there are (hopefully :-) exceptions to the rule!
Legacy basically... When I wrote the first version of DataTables the company I was working fir then had strict coding standards that required the use of Hungarian notation, so I was "trained" in at at the time, and I've never wanted to break compatibility with old versions. v2 might see a clean break though (whenever I get the time to do that :-) ).
Don't bother breaking compatibility with old versions.
You want to know something that is 100x better? This exact comment on your FAQ page. More people will read it, understand you made that decision, and move on.
If someone cares enough they will fork it and change the variable names. But in reality it doesn't matter.
please don't do that. part of what makes using jquery plugins so horrific is that every new version is a "total rewrite" and/or drastically changes the API.
the API might use hungarian notation, and you might have fallen out of love with it, but so what? it's a pretty decent API and there's no real benefit to users in changing it. they'll all to have to update/rewrite their JS to stay up to date with the library for effectively no reason.
Thanks for the feedback - I really appreciate it. I'm currently in the middle of developing v1.9 of DataTables and backwards compatibility is key for me here. v2 is a good way off, and I'm certainly not committed to removing the hungarian notation (actually I find it quite useful personally). 1.x and the current API have been going since 2007 and is going to be supported for as long as I can see at the moment. If there are any breaking changes in v2, will be supported in parallel.
I know I don't want to update my own code for a new API on every release! Going back to the point of the OP there are certainly cases when writing custom code is beneficial for that reason, and equally (I believe) there are times when a tried and tested library such as DataTables is suitable.
So there are (hopefully :-) exceptions to the rule!