The Chrome Dev Tools have unearthed some problems similar to those posted here, more DOM nodes being created than I feel should be given my design choices.

What’s a good way to figure out what area of code is causing runaway DOM node creation? The information is really useful but figuring out what to do with it seems much less straightforward than, for example, dealing with a CPU profile.
Try taking two heap snapshots (the
Profilespanel), one with few DOM nodes and one with lots of them, then compare and see if many nodes are retained. If yes, you will be able to detect the primary retainers.