It's hard to comment in this one i think. Yes, it's lame to use spacer GIFs as a design standpoint, with all web community try to separate meaningless technique's (tables, spacers,  etc...) from documents.

However for this web site, Yes it just doesn't matter.The functionality become more important.There is news link and comment section with a clean interface. Not much black ink.

If you are in this situation, it doesn't matter but with your new startup's i think its better stick with the notion of separating mark-up with design.

I can't keep silent to those anti-css comments but don't know where to start...i think web started as a way of exchanging "documents" between computers. So in basic terms what you see in your screen is "a document" so it should be seen as " a document". without css in html code what you see is...well some kind of hectic ASCII art.

"It is a valuable thing if your page seen as a document"

i sometimes think that, under the supervision of PG, a small design team (designer, info. arch. & UI person) "may" help founded startups to achieve better in their goals.