You only neded to know which HTML tags worked on IE and Netscape. We did our layout with tables... And they worked.. 100% of the time.
Then came Javascript, a language designed to make a monkey dance in a webpage. And all hell broke loose. Suddenly you didn't know which script would work on which browser.
Latter came CSS, and for the next 5 years everybody went looking for the holy grail of CSS that was a layout that looked like tables did.
The the browser wars ended, IE won and maybe could have some peace... But it didn't last.
Latter came JQuery and it made JavaScript tolerable, and then came bootstrap and made CSS tolerable.
Then came Coffee Script and all of the languages that comile to it... JavaScript became the "assembly" of the web.
Then the iphone came a long and now, your webpage gad to work in a screen resolution you didn't know existed. --- My conclusion: Front end development is an inestable mess.
Plagued with accidental complexity as defined by Fred Brooks. I left it around the time I realized that fighting CSS layouts to do what a table could wasn't for me. And I stayed as a back end developer.
I definitely recommend changing direction but not completely, where can your skills for usability and design be valuable with less of the accidental complexity??
Maybe mobile development? Specialize in a single platform and become an expert there?