For all the things you wrote, I hear you. Having said that, I've personally had nothing but awful experiences using CSS directly and these frameworks have really come to my rescue and let me focus on the stuff that matters to *my* users. Maybe it's just a matter of not having found the right CSS tutorials, or maybe the world of CSS and browser compatibility has changed significantly since the last time I bothered to try. I will give your series a try, though, perhaps I'll come round.