I pushed back against CSS for a long time because people were telling me that HTML tables were evil and that I should use CSS (the original) instead. So I tried rebuilding my simple three column autoscaling (the left and right columns were fixed size, the middle filled all of the remaining space) website and after waving many dead chickens I still wasn't completely happy with the results. People were pointing to stuff like CSS Zen Garden layouts that had oceans of wasted space on large screens and completely broke on small screens.

Plus the documentation was written in this incredibly formal style that was very difficult to read and browser support was all over the map. In the end I went back to tables and just used CSS to set fonts and colors. Even more amazingly, CSS2 still sucked at this very obvious problem! But at least by this part people had figured out slightly less hacky workarounds (still with tons of clear: both though) that let one remove HTML tables while still retaining some sanity.