>The death of Fireworks made me much much better at CSS, SVG, and HTML.

I barely used Fireworks, but primarily for the slicing of images into tables that was all the rage. I did use Dreamweaver and the Adobe app whose name is eluding me. One day I actually looked at the HTML/CSS from those apps, and it was not human readable at all. From that day forward, I started moving away from those apps and just wrote it by hand. So much less bloat. But I will admit, they were most definitely a nice set of training wheels to start the learning process.