The thing is, the wheel has pretty much been invented now. I think we’re coming from around the same place; back when I was doing webdev, I did most of my development in Notepad.
These days there are a lot of good, free alternatives to hand-crufting. Even if you only use it as a starting point and then tweak the code manually, there’s little reason to start with a blank sheet and type “<HTML>”.
WordPress is surprisingly feature rich these days. Joomla is a well-regarded CMS, and there’s another one whose name escapes me but is Joomla’s main competitor with a number of strengths and weaknesses.