Ask HN: Making Front End Work Suck Less?

Background: CS degree, roughly a decade of experience in a lot of different parts of information security. These days I've become a bit of a generalist with a lean towards networking, protocols and working on what I think of a data-centric development projects. A couple of years ago we were trying to find a frontend guy, and for whatever reason had no luck so I went back and taught myself a bit.

These days I end up doing a lot of solo projects, full stack. DB, actual code, front end, etc. Essentially everything but the visual design.

I've realized though, the frontend (html/js/css) take an inordinate amount of time compared to everything else. Outsourcing doesn't seem to help, as even with local people with good reputations I end up spending about as much time correcting and managing them to get the same results as I can produce.

Love ruby for my high level language so I'm using rails on most everything, and as friendly of a stack as I can find. Slim, Scss, Coffeescript, bootstrap or the bourbon ecosystem for my starting framework. It is a lot better than it could be, but honestly it still sucks. Everything about the web portion seems to be crud layered on top of crud.

I had some downtime recently and spent it with some procedural content generation, a couple thousand lines over the course of a few days. Implementing interesting algorithms and stitching them together instead of the repeatedly beating state onto a stateless medium that is the modern web.

So, realizing the power of the web and the tradeoffs being worth it, even with it being a time sink. I'm wondering if any of you with more of a background in non-web development have any tips that helped you become more comfortable on the web side and maybe even enjoy it?