All my friends built customized MySpace pages back in the day, but none of them are coders now. It gave you just enough tools to make a really interesting profile, but you would quickly hit a ceiling. During the same period, I was learning HTML using Dreamweaver and Arachnophilia (a combination of WYSIWYG and IDE). So I disagree w/the premise, even if there may have been some people that kept going, I doubt that it was a large contributor to the devs we have today because if you want to start coding you will probably start with something that gives you more flexibility.