Well, the alternative is always to write it yourself. The same could be said for jQuery or any framework (and many have been advocating doing that) but it's always a trade off between experience/time/resources. I don't think it's really fair to compare a feature rich plugin that provides a lot of generic functionality vs what you can write for a very specific requirement, esp if you don't need the any/most of the functionality in the plugin!

I used Datatables a few years ago extensively for a provide, I actually found it very easy to work with - but I understood the notation having come from a VBScript background a long time ago - and as others have said, it was miles ahead of anything else at the time.