[robin_reala]

I agree with you for the most part, with one exception. Your workflow is modelled on a hypothetical developer who does markup and backend code, and a CSS guru who does the styling. This approach doesn’t work for the reasons you give, but everything becomes a lot easier if you rejig the responsibilities into:

a) back-end developer who provides the controller, model and a shell view (this could be anything from a basic HTML structure through to raw JSON)

b) front-end developer who has responsibility for building sane markup and clean CSS. It’s in their best interests to keep the styles maintainable: a little extra time writing markup that integrates into the existing styles and refactoring existing CSS to cope with the new modules is worth it in the long run.