[mcgwiz]

Taking a linguistic perspective, one can analyze HTML usage through the lenses of prescription and description.

Prescriptively, HTML was designed to be used a certain way. "Proper" use of it supports a variety of use cases beyond graphical browser-based publications and applications.

Descriptively, there is no "right" or "wrong", "proper" or "improper". <div>s and <span>s are often enough because they get The Job™ done, for some critical subset of all "jobs." It is true that web scraping and machine parsing of content becomes harder when tags aren't applied semantically, and that text- and speech-based browsing is more difficult. It would seem that those needs are simply not substantial enough to the commissioners of web development work to warrant the extra attention and care, especially in the hyper-competitive, sink-or-swim environment of tech startups.

It is (nominally) what it is (actually).

The real problem is a lack of exploitation and education of the secondary applications of semantic HTML and how it fits in with related technologies (HTTP headers vs <META>, URLs and fragment identifiers, microformats and CSS semantic class naming) by product designers. This would naturally drive developer interest. In the meantime, those who do understand these things can continue to devise solutions orders of magnitude more efficient or effective.