One gray beard to another:
If it's any consolation, I have always hated HTML and adjacent. Initially, it was such a huge leap backwards, like giving yourself a lobotomy. I just didn't get the appeal. As a better gopher, absolutely, sign me up. But the next hypertext & multimedia platform? HA! We already had awesome multimedia and hypertext. I expected the Next Thing, not some punk's brain dead IMG tag, blink, and marque scroll.
Shows what I know.
My very first "web" project, in 1998, was dual publishing product catalogs to CD-ROM and online. What the kids today call "static site generators." (Wrestling with Netscape App Server and JRunner cemented my hatred of the web.) I treated URLs as just another UNC; pathnames are pathnames, right? I just didn't grasp the impact domain names would have.
I eventually concluded that the magic sauce was URLs, built on top of DNS, begating "the web".
That took me a really long time to appreciate. Its failings -- broken links, one-way links, link rot -- were also its strengths.
I've been run over time and again by "worse is better." So many times, that I can't help but conclude I'm impaired somehow. Like I really thought Jini, JXTA, tuplespaces, grid computing were going to transform everything. Instead we got REST, serverless, and JavaScript. Like going to a fancy restaurant, ordering a medium rare porterhouse steak, and being served whatever they scrapped off the rat infested dirt floor. And then when you protest, even so much as raise an eyebrow, you're the idiot.
HTTP isn't so bad. I really wish I had thought about HTML and HTTP separately, from the beginning. I actually kinda like HTTP 1.1 & 2.0. (The successors continue to befuddle me.)
Thanks for listening. I'll be out front, yelling at kids and dogs.
PS- I was totally right about Java. Too bad Sun let Captain IMG Tag sabotage it on the client.