There was also quite a bit of elitism and protectionism about it, because for a while a lot of people were actually more or less making a living from writing nothing but plain HTML. If anyone can make a web page, what good are HTML skills? Quickly, let's find something bad about it and save our jobs!
I just looked into the nightmarish tree of nested div's and span's (of which FrontPage and DreamWeaver are innocent) that's a Twitter feed. JFC, I don't want to ever have to scrape one.
You could have it produce outstanding markup, but that meant spending a lot of quality time, playing with the templates.
Want to write documentation, or a personal website full of text and pictures? Maybe a simple text site for your restaurant or small business without much fluff? Then it's alright.
Want to do a professional-looking site that looks like the ones you pay money for? Maybe look for something else, or at the very least start with a handcrafted template, instead of "faking it" with sliced images and javascript hover.
The reaction against Dreamweaver was IMO understandable because there were definitely some people in the industry who were convinced that Dreamweaver was enough for anything.
I have no idea how i had frontpage, but i'm sure it lead into acquiring "real skills".
There's a lot more to apps like dreamweaver, frontpage, etc. than it seems. They are bad tools, but also comes with a linear learning curve that has its advantages.