"Redesign is classic organization-centric thinking. It rarely has much to do with making things better for the customer."

I think a lot of the 'customer-centricity' got lost in the process. so the problem is the process.

At least the DT separate content from presentation, viewing older BBC News articles brings up a bewildering array of old, new and broken designs as the static pages are published in one format and then ignored!

I'm afraid, like most things to do with web standards, its a case of personal pride. I love creating nice, standards-compliant, accessible, gracefully degrading pages, at least until I test them in Internet Explorer. Serving two masters - the emerging standards and the latent implementations of old ones, and what "should be" done versus what "can be" done - will always end up with developers pulled in two different directions.

Personally, I think the marginal effort needed to make pages semantically correct is negligible and, from a business perspective, creates vastly more value, in terms of wider audience catch and improved Google rankings, than they consume in developer hours.