Got to love good old Joomla coding huh? I am sure glad I work on Wordpress sites 363 days out of the year.. Every time I go to work on a Joomla site, it never fails.. About all it does well is piss me off. All the nested divs used in a joomla page is enough to make a person puke. All those nested divs below are used in a page just for one little part to transition from a sidebar to the main content div? wtf? They call this a good CMS? About all it takes with some real coding is about 3 divs and not 35.. Felt like venting a little I guess, but come on. No wonder a Joomla page takes about 45 - 60 seconds to load.
I agree with you on that. One of the biggest problems I find with most CMS is unnecessary html tags. So far WP does a pretty good job. I don't have much experience with Drupal, but I feel it might be better in terms of concise html. Have you tried it?