title: Why is jQuery an Ember.js dependency?
body: <p>I can understand needing some abstraction layer for common operations like retrieving DOM elements, attribute manipulation, etc., but jQuery is a pretty massive library that seems like a lot of overkill for Ember.</p>
  
  <p>After looking through the source code, there are only about 30 or so uses of jQuery in Ember and it looks like the majority of jQuery usage is simple selector calls, some events, and some DOM traversal.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Ember.$(rootElement).off('.ember', '**').removeClass('ember-application');</p>
    
    <p>...</p>
    
    <p>elem = this.$();</p>
    
    <p>...</p>
    
    <p>this.$().appendTo(target);</p>
    
    <p>...</p>
    
    <p>Ember.$(window).on('hashchange.ember-location-'+guid, function() {</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>etc.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any other reasons Ember requires jQuery for every application?</p>
  
  <p>Could these few uses be embedded into Ember and jQuery removed as a dependency? </p>