I am curious to understand why caching element references became unmanageable. It is certainly the case that caching is widely recommended for performance reasons. (See, e.g. [here](http://www.tipsfromsiliconvalley.com/2013/06/17/jquery-guide-10-best-practices-with-jquery-1-7-for-front-end-developers/), [here](http://www.slideshare.net/AddyOsmani/jquery-proven-performance-tips-tricks), [here](http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/#cache-jquery-objects), [here](http://lprocksit.blogspot.com/2012/05/jquery-advanced-performance-best.html), [here](http://www.slideshare.net/brinsknaps/jquery-best-practices), [here](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/14-helpful-jquery-tricks-notes-and-best-practices/), and [here](http://gregfranko.com/jquery-best-practices/#/13).)

In most cases I would want maintainability to have higher priority than performance, so if caching does introduce maintenance problems, then forgoing the performance boost could be appropriate. I would expect, though, that caching should reduce errors in the code, especially for complex selectors, since the code for the selector would only need to be included once.