Having an art school design education and a bit over a decade in (mostly back-end) web development, I've had plenty of deseloper type roles. If they fall under a design or marketing department, they'll spend 80% of the time doing design work and try to throw it together on some shitty wysiwyg monstrosity, ignoring performance, stability, maintainability, etc. If they fall under technical departments, design, ahem, decoration and polish is something to be applied at the end, if there's time, after the real work is done. Either way, having the same group of people responsible for two halves of that coin rarely yields a good balance, and they almost never pay any real attention to usability ... at least not for use cases that don't exactly mirror their own. Seems to me that replacing the flexibility of current markup and styling tools with simple markdown and reader-type layouts is just trying to apply the tech-focused solution to the entire problem the way Flash tried to do the opposite.