[acjohnson55]

We probably shouldn't forget that a lot of the old-school CSS stuff were hacks meant to get around limitations in the standards. In isolation, they were pretty cool, but in terms of composability, maintainability, and compatibility, they were a nightmare. Life pre-SASS sucked, and even pre-BEM it was pretty horrible once an app started to sprawl. There's still a place for all of the great little CSS techniques, but just factored into mixins, where the implementation can be encapsulated, and represented by something much smaller that represents the effect.

You're right that there's a bewildering number of technologies and approaches out there, but I think we're actually converging towards something sane. Certain waypoints are basically being agreed upon. Sure, we have SASS/LESS/Stylus/PostCSS, but ultimately people use them 95% identically, and that commonality was a huge win. BEM has similarly been a huge win, wand widely adopted. Reading the OP, I was nodding my head along as I read, and I think they're on to something really good. We're getting close to a point where we'll have easy to write, easy to employ, semantically meaningful styles with a more or less transparent build process.