I don't really get you then. You seem to claim that design is important but at the same time deny it.
I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.
What? It's really simple. The most important thing, to me, is excellent content. Good design will help excellent content, but excellent content is still great even if it has poor design.
Great design does not help shoddy content.
If an aspiring author asks me for advice do I tell them to work on the plotting and characters? Or do I suggest some bike-shedding around nice fonts and paragraph indentation styles?
Uhm, as a rule, authors should do none of those things. (I will make an exception for Douglas R. Hofstadter. If you want a book where presentation is interwoven with content and you can't really separate one from the other you have to read Gödel Escher Bach. In general, though, it’s safe to say that most authors are not Douglas R. Hofstadter. Gödel Escher Bach is also one of those books that’s hard to make into an ebook – and hasn’t been for that reason – because web technologies are lagging behind the printed book so badly.) They need experts to do that.
I’m not suggesting that authors start bikeshedding. I want professionals to do their profession. Authors are rarely good designers.
I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.