JavaScript vs Jquery. Folks say JQ is easier, but...

The first thing here I would say is that jQuery is not a substitute for Vanilla JS. It's a tool that aids more rapid development of applications. If you want to animate a menu or select some elements to change on the fly then jQuery is a great choice for that. Also if you're looking to develop plugins to share with a community I would go with jQuery.

If you want to manipulate the canvas to say draw a pie chart using math then you're going to use JS theres no avoiding it. Another example may be writing a clock, you could extend the native Date method in JS to enable you to achieve this but there is no alternative in jQuery.

jQuery is written in JS and will handle a lot of backward compatibility issues associated to different browser versions which can be really useful and may make your code more succinct. The flip side of this is you need to include the jQuery library to enable this. You may not want dependancies on third party software or you may have restrictions on bandwidth that make your pages load more slowly when you include jQuery.

I like both and ultimately anything that can be done with jQuery can be done in JS but not everything that can be done with JS could be done using jQuery core methods. Ultimately it's down to time, preference/comfort and usability. Weigh up your requirements and make a decision. I would think for most people jQuery is a viable option for what they want to achieve.

The great thing with jQuery being written in JS means that you can use both together and will often find yourself doing so where jQuery core methods don't supply the functionality that you need.

Vanilla JS is hard to learn no doubt. But like anything that is difficult to do the rewards are great.