Yes I broadly agree with you Jakob. CSS is most certainly a wonderful tool and indeed something I love.
However it has many short comings. The promising thing is that future specifications do look likely to solve, well not solve perhaps but alleviate some of the issues your talking about with grid layouts. As well as other issues.
Of course the downside of that is anything new takes a long time to agree upon, roll out and even longer to be practicably usable due to do supporting outdated browsers.
So I guess we'll need to grin and bare it.
Yes I broadly agree with you