Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: "Simple UI tasks don't take rocket science, they take a proper understanding of those three standards, and a lot of discipline." I appears to me you are contradicting yourself. It comes across as: "It doesn't take the discipline of rocket science, but merely the discipline of rocket science". GUI's didn't take "a lot of discipline" in say VB-classic, Delphi, or Oracle Forms[1]: you dragged it to where you intende…
rocket sceince !== proper understanding rocket science !== discipline VB-classic, Delphi, or Oracle Forms have whats known as drag-and-drop/visual programming. Comparing them to CSS & HTML isn't a fair comparison, unless you compare that to a drag-and-drop GUI that creates HTML & CSS for you.
HTML & CSS can't do WYSIWYG sufficiently, especially if text is involved. Thus it's apples to black-holes.