It was "fun" when tinkering with some really creative special concern, it was an insufferable pain when your job was finding ways to layout all the "fun" designers envisioned who weren't highly familiar with CSS.

Before position and float madness and all, we used to abuse tables -- because layouts for complex information do work best in grid systems. Now CSS finally has a module that serves this purpose, and brings a huge amount of flexibility to make formerly painful stuff easy.

I'm not even talking about "page layouts" as a whole, just simple particle patterns like "a big icon with a title + description to it's right" is so so much cleaner and easier to do in markup AND css with grid.

Embrace the tools, and if you dislike them - you may as well just not use them. But thinks like grid make simple, stupid, deadlined webdesign _work_ so so much less of a grind.

(speaking as a General Graphic Designer who's also been deep, deep in CSS since before 2.1)