[grayrest]

> still awful at CSS

I recommend you look into SASS/Compass. You have to learn the abstractions on top of CSS but from there you can leverage other people's knowledge of the tricks/hacks involved in putting together a good CSS layout.

I've recommended this to a number of people in roughly your position with good success. The biggest problem they've run into is with the SCSS syntax and once I got them converted over to sass (-x SASS) they all did fine. SASS won't teach you design and the designs have all been terrible, but generating the stylesheets ceases to be the problem.

On the other hand, I've had a terrible track record trying to do the same with designers.

> This is a good sign (I think?).

The revulsion tends to go away after you've been doing it a few years. You never stop learning, so there's usually a sigh when you see something you could have done better.