Wish there was another standard that could co-exist side by side on the web, something simple enough to be implemented reliably by the browser vendors.
That standard exists. It's called flexbox. It was designed to solve exactly this problem (among many others), and does.
That said, as I never tire of mentioning, vertical centering was a part of the design of CSS 2.1. The technique is called "absolute centering". See CSS 2.1 10.6.4 [1]: "If both 'margin-top' and 'margin-bottom' are 'auto', solve the equation under the extra constraint that the two margins get equal values."
[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visudet.html#abs-non-replaced-hei...
wtf?
do...do they know...how many manhours could've been saved...?
Personally, I don't find css to be that bad at all, but I work in it at least a little everyday so it might just be stockholm syndrome.
It is inefficient. It is awkward to set up in code, so many people write their own syntactic sugar around it. It crashes hard when it isn't 100% sure what to do with its constraints. Working with multi-line text is still a pain, so you often run into clipped text on iOS if you dare to increase the font size. etc.