hellooooo tribunauts!
long time no see. my bad for being so busy...
but I just added a feature that makes d3.json (and d3.csv, d3.xml etc) work as you'd hope it would in tributary.
The problem used to be that every keystroke would cause a new ajax call because the code is re-run. I used some esprima AST magic to hijack the d3.json function (as well as its cousins) that caches the result by the last URL you put in.
you should be able to develop with d3.json worry free in almost every case. if you want to turn off the caching for some reason there is a new button in the config panel.
for example: