I think I failed to mention that designers inadvertently venture into the 50/50 space because they are learning something new. It’s human nature to be curious and human nature to venture into understanding what you don’t understand. I’m speaking from experience, and I’ve worked with web designers who design in HTML/CSS for websites, and I have worked with graphic designers using graphic tools for websites, and in all cases the graphic designers create more compelling designs that have great form and function for a web page/site. I’ve asked myself why is that? I believe it’s because the designer was in a design realm, where cognitive thinking takes over and they can be expressive on the canvas. I think I should title my argument ‘How designing in HTML/CSS is watering down Web Design’.
What happened to the days of awesome intricate websites. Now we are all using cookie cutter templates and flat color palettes because bootstrap and google say so? We’ve taken the ‘Design’ out of Web Design in my humble opinion.