Personally, I loved the narrative. Which I mention not to suggest you shouldn't want something else, but so that the authors know that people liked it as is.
I also found the narrative really helpful. We run some similar products around maps, it was interesting to see how they approached this!
I'd like to know more about the SVG / VML fallback for rendering. We are working on a system where we are doing SVG directly and have a "TODO" for figure out how to get it rendered in IE