This feels like the origin of a lot of these mistakes (and more besides): they weren't based on "what is it that lots of real designers are actually trying to accomplish?". Why did it take so long to get support for pinstriping, when prior to that there were 1001 different ways to try and accomplish it, because so many people wanted it? Why did it take so long to get layout functionality that even just matched the power of what CSS was intending to replace? Or vertical alignment, or drop shadows, etc, etc, etc. I like CSS and the intentions of it, but man, it was designed from a place of having no idea what people wanted to do.