Does injecting the SVG before everything, right after opening the <body> hinders page render performance?
Moving the injected SVG to the head solves the render issue, what would happen with page render performance, validation and compatibility (ie)?
PS: live example: http://codepen.io/rhawbert/pen/uAKfw
Here are a few quick results for what shows up. I can run more tests later if you'd like. We may be able to actually automate this to some extent and toss the results the Browserscope.