several million sites online where created using dreamweaver, yes I understand that it adds a shitload of tags but the end user will not know that and nowhere cares.
Yes, I do understand that some people feel the need the bash it, its the same mindset that yells that you cant make money unless you break your back and that if you use AOL you arent a real human.
So ignore those stupid fucks, do what works, whats easy and gets the job done, if the end user wont know and it wont effect the site who cares!
And yes, learning CSS, PHP, MySQL and all that is good too, all depends what you are trying to build.
Again, do it the easiest way possible, the fact that some stupid techie will look at your code and say "wow look at those extra lines of code, its not needed, and that in IE 3 it wont load fast and in some crap browser that only techies use it wont load quick enough" IGNORE them, these are sad humans that seriously have mental issues. Again care about the site and its functions, thats all.