He would mark stories as done that had tons of layout problems. He just couldn't be arsed to dig into it, because you actually had to stick your whole arm into the guts to get things to work. Between me and another guy who were doing 60% of the interactions and north of 80% of the bugfixes we finally browbeat him into going back to real HTML templates. He retreated to writing mostly backend code from then on, which honestly reduced our workload by itself.
Pretending you have a different set of core problems than you actually have has never ended well for me, and I'm convinced it has never ended well for anyone else either. Don't abstract away your problem domain, and don't kid yourself about what your problem domain is.