Strata of web-ness

It occurs to me that we are diverging in technical ability.
It's now 20 years since kids started flunking IT classes and for every year of that twenty someone has been saying : "Awww kids today - they live on these machines - they'll be amazing when they grow up". Now to some extent it's true - but to a massive extent it isn't. Yes techies and engineers are more prevalent today than yesterday. Yes all my schoolmates now work in IT related professions. Yes html is probably more widely comprehended than many non-meta languages, and far easier than French.
But there is still a yawning gap between the knows and the nearly knows not to mention the don't know, don't cares.
The dogmatic insistence of CSS & DHTML is undemocratic. It's HARD. Never mind the increasing reliance on push-technologies like ajax. (incomprehensible to most of us even as a concept, let alone once the acronym is actually explained).
It is all well and good that halfway tools exist - like GooglePages - but there is a chasm in understanding between the technically minded and the average user. And the average user seems to be getting more reliant and less technical because, well, what's the point? It's like trying to take an engine apart and put it back together again. Simpler just to get someone to make it work.