Agreed. So I was discussing this with @jverghese when you were gone. The d3 "layout" is misleading b/c it doesn't actually have anything to do with the display, it simply mutates the data by applying offsets.

Since this is exactly the type of thing we're supporting with Johann's Data Manager thing we decided to add it as a mutator function *there* once his branch is merged. For now it's just in the example to illustrate how to do it.