definitely wasn't roses. having to deal with a bunch of transparent gifs to for rounded buttons during the web 2.0 craze was a headache...but at least it was immediate, i was working directly in html and css

and yes you're right the overall scene now is 100x better in terms of the open source community. many problems have been sold. it's more the tooling and layering of everything that is exhausting, and the ever expanding list of nuances and edge cases...