Yeah, I know you discuss that the tradeoff is "worth it", but if you're writing CSS classes like that you lose a lot of the ability to redesign your site in the future without restructuring markup. The whole point of using CSS in the first place is to separate style from markup. The classes might still be "descriptive", but you're definitely putting style right there in your markup.

If you're set on using a CSS framework, I really think Compass (http://compass-style.org/) is a must. However, the syntax is so wacko I can see anyone's aversion to it.

A definitive solution to this problem has yet to emerge.