I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.

I wouldn't agree. I'm a math professor, here's my own web site:

http://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/

Very simple static HTML. No stylesheet at all.

Although there are also a fair number of academics who invest more effort in web design than I do, this type of design is fairly common in math. I haven't heard anyone within the field criticize it as "bad" or "lazy".

People aren't coming to your website randomly, they're coming because you're their professor and they were linked this site.

My students are part of the audience, but not all.

For example, if I give a talk at a conference, then someone who was in the audience might plausibly look up my website to get a sense of my research interests.

For some reason I have always seen academic websites like yours as a different concept. Most academic websites look like yours and I think that’s fine.

I was thinking more of something like a CMS control panel or some data-entry tool, or a consumer website like an e-commerce.

> I doubt very much that anybody can launch a website / web-app today with only user-agent stylesheets and be successful. Even for an internal product that would be seen as bad/lazy/unoptimal.

The triumph of form over function.