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Unfortunately, something that CSS Zen Garden has also demonstrated, however unintentionally, is that to have so much flexibility with CSS you also need a bunch of extra non-semantic mark-up in the original HTML. We've developed a few tricks over the years using things like pseudo-elements to avoid some of this, but the HTML+CSS model isn't quite powerful enough at the moment to really live up to the ideal of complete separation of content from presentation.

Probably because it's extremely rare you change only the visual element of a site. Total graphic redesigns are often accompanied by more traditional upgrades and feature requests.

I frequently change fonts, adjust margins, borders, colors, positions of elements on my sites all the time. I might not be doing anything radical but I am redesigning the site in it's entirety every time I change the CSS.

Imagine how difficult it was to just changing the font size on a website before CSS.