Yeah, I remember every version of IE being horrible, just none so bad as IE 6. I once had to recode a site that had been built with no tables and CSS that was supposed to follow standards but had really been tested only in IE. Horrific!

I don't miss front-end coding professionally (went into IA/UX a few years ago), but it's kind of reassuring to see how some things never change. There always were cliques in the standards vs tables crowd, and now that standards pretty much won the fight on the professional level (for the most part at least and applied in a real-world kind of way), it's not surprising it's gotten even more cliquish.