It's not necessarily a bad thing that DOM-manipulation functions are a bit annoying to type. Verbose names means that you are more likely to do:

    var elem = document.getElementsByClassName('foo')[0];
    elem.fooBar();
    elem.foo = 'bar';

rather than

    $('.foo').fooBar();
    $('.foo').foo = 'bar';

even if you don't know anything about writing optimized JavaScript code.