>Your marginalizing of CSS-related work says to me that you haven't had to maintain large web apps, where CSS quality is that important.

This is my exact point, I have maintained large web apps that often have budgets and limited resources. I my experience they are always way more important pressing matters (aka actual bugs/features effecting revenue) then CSS semantics. There are companies out there that will of course deem this as important, but in my experience this has been a minority.

Getting bogged down into the semantics of html/css can also be limiting, unless you really enjoy doing it, personally I hate CSS, it's an ends to a means and a bad one at that.