[akjetma]

I think it's because it has historically been low-status work and stigma about working on the front-end persists. The majority of people I've worked with are eager to throw up their hands and commiserate with others about their lack of understanding about CSS (which, for some reason, indicates you are of higher status) rather than learning about how it works and doing a bit of memorization.

I personally have no problem doing front-end work when I have to and I think the fact that I don't drag my feet or complain about CSS has allowed me to learn it to a degree that has made it reasonable and quick to do.

Also most of the shitty parts of front-end development have been abstracted away with things like CSS vendor auto-prefixing and tools like ClojureScript and reagent. One of my favorite parts of the stack now, actually (when I can use those tools).