I too learned the basics of CSS back in the IE6 era, and I had no trouble following the steps of the tutorials, using similarly primitive tools. If I'd had an experience like yours, I suppose my career might have gone in a different direction. Instead, though, as soon as I tried to take what I thought I had learned from those tutorials and make something of my own, I smashed into a wall of chaos; nothing seemed to be predictable. I knew the browser could do what I was imagining, because I had been making it do that for years already via tables and repeating GIFs and all that, but trying to do it with CSS got me nowhere.