IF you have enough brain power to come of with a business concept that actually works, you should be able to find someone that is fairly reasonable to help get your Website looking good.
How would you launch a site like the story book one without good design? I get that you can gloss up many sites after the fact, but there seem to be a number of categories (e.g. games) where UX/Aesthetics are key from launch.
This 'trap' is really old... namely treating design as some sort of lipstick on the pig. Design doesn't consist in producing attractive photoshop files. In web UX is an intricate part of the design process and vice versa.
I agree, my current employer spent the last five years building a product using mostly overseas developers with one developer over here coordinating and piecing together the code. They treated development as something that just needed to be done, as apposed to treating it like the core of their product (which it is). Now they have a big, slow, behemoth and they've finally brought more developers in house to try to help clean things up. I think that a lot of people tend to treat design and UX the same way, something that just needs to "get done", as apposed to something that (might) be a major piece of your product or service.