CSS is one of the easiest and simplest way to design in web. Use dreamweaver to ease up CSS, then after that, you may learn faster. CSS is one of the best way for search engine friendly websites.
Yeah, it makes your content clearer to search engines, because you're not forced to use messy tables. Plus you can do stuff like this http://www.gradski.net The 'stars' see the way they overlap the other content, if you used tabels you'd have to slice it to make it look like it was overlapping, with css you can just use absoloute positioning and drag them anywhere you want.
I remember watching FLASH get into the website business trying to take over html. Somehow, it got stuck. Somewhere. We are now using it for advertisements mostly, and too few have got their websites fully "flashed". I'd use it more if it weren't eating so many computer resources. CSS is a different story, looks nice, a bit hard to learn at the beginning but once you get going, it's a pleasure to work with. I do find XHTML a bit exagerating at times but that's another pleasure to play with. Only when I get time to or am paid for. To answer your Shakespeare's question, I'd say learning CSS won't hurt. Just don't follow others who would kill if a website contained a table, stuff like that. Concrete homes are good, wood is still not bad if you prefer it