I recognize that these are important qualities in certain environments (such as a startup). Similarly, with limited resources we may also find ourselves skimping on the engineering end as well. However, I was simply responding to the original comment which was:

  If you don't know CSS, you're not a web designer and have no business building websites to begin with. You can't design properly for a medium which has limitations you don't understand.

My response to this was simply that no, you can be a fantastic web designer without knowing CSS, and perhaps even better. Maybe your skills would not translate well in certain environments, but to go from that to criticizing said designer and saying he has no place on the web is frivolous.