[steve_adams_86]

Totally, that's a good point. The trade-off makes sense for heaps of people's needs. It's a big part of why it's so successful in my opinion.

Plain old CSS will let you create optimal styling solutions for HTML documents, which is nice, but... How often is that actually necessary or even tangible for any end-user experience?

Anyone who needs better solutions is likely working in some scenario, on some team, where the problem of slow style recalculations or excessive payload sizes could be identified and resolved easily enough anyway. It's a trade-off, but the escape hatch is a few steps away.