[roca]

I think that's a bit unfair to Houdini. As others noted here, one of the main goals for Houdini is to make CSS cleanly extensible, so every time some cool new feature comes along you don't have to choose between a) waiting for it to be standardized and implemented in browsers and b) abandoning CSS entirely.

Of course, I agree with the rest of your points.

[pcwalton]

That's fair. I don't have an issue with Houdini if it's actually used to create custom layouts that you can't reasonably do in CSS.