I don't know the inner workings of it, but in web browsers the number of DOM nodes end up being the limiting factor when you're dealing with large SVGs. I guess because there are so many extra objects and everything needs to be tracked / event handling etc. If you were writing to a one way rendering to a surface I guess things would be different.

You could use a group full of individual paths, and call that a single shape, but it's not really a single shape. I know I'm just splitting hairs, but the DOM node thing is a bit of a problem for me.

PS I do think having two languages is a little bit silly really, but I don't mind that much