[hereonout2]

This is pretty much my experience too, back then I had a copy of a 1000+ page book called HTML 4 The Complete Reference.

With that tome on my desk it honestly didn't take much work to be able to do a better job than Dreamweaver using notepad and writing HTML by hand.

I never got into the advanced Dreamweaver features, am sure I remember loads of stuff around managing complete sites with it, etc. But from a purely front end developers perspective it always seemed superfluous.