@spamcourt said:The first rule of standards design is: the easy way to do it must be the good way to do it.
It's been my experience that doing it the right way actually is easier in terms of how long it takes to develop and how maintainable it is, but it is definitely harder to learn (I think mostly because too many websites preach bad methodology). If you've got all your styles tied in with your markup and you need to do a site-wide redesign on a site with thousands of pages/dozens-to-hundreds of unique templates, you've got a major undertaking on your hands; with proper separation of content and CSS, it takes an order of magnitude less effort.
Something similar recently came up with our website, a single developer got it up in a single release cycle (weekly, with time for QA).