SASS and LESS provide really nice language improvements, but they don't fix all the crap about box models and positioning and polyfills and byzantine precedence rules and the necessity for silly hacks like this. It's just too complicated and painful to make things look the way you want them to look, which is the point of CSS. I've gotten pretty good at it and I've come to care a lot about how it works (e.g. this little visualization is a really nice demonstration), but this state of affairs saddens me; I wish I could concentrate on other stuff, and not how to make a goddamn triangle.
(At some level of technical hair-splitting, this isn't per-se CSS's fault and is more general DOM crapiness, but that distinction is largely irrelevant. They're still problems I'm expected to solve with CSS.)
That's the thing though, we have to deal with it. I don't get why there isn't just a complete replacement trending on HN every other month. Sure, it needs browser support and it would forgo a lot of the CSS-specific optimizations baked into the browsers but there has to be a more efficient way to handle the DOM.
But maybe I think this because I don't view it as a language, to me it's more of a configuration file that holds sets of instructions. It's getting closer to a proper language though.
You can have your opinion I suppose, but nearly every web tech I've worked with over the years has had its transitions from good to bad to hated only to end up somehow good again.