QUOTE: We no longer need ye olde monstrous institutionals (Emacs, Vi, Aptana...) ?

I use vi when I need to write HTML or clean up HTML that was generated automatically. I tend to write my own generators, though, or use very carefully selected generators that I'm sure will do an excellent job -- either by offering fine-grained control or just being really good at doing it "right" -- so that the end result will not even need any clean-up work, and I use vi to write those generators in other languages like Ruby, too. I don't use generators that produce craptastic hairballs like MS Word or OpenOffice.org because I don't need that kind of aggravation.

There isn't really anything particularly monstrous about the lightweight vi-like editors, anyway (though one might make a case for some monstrosity in Vim).

QUOTE: If you are a part-time coder working solo for non-profits with server access restricted by your hosts, I suggest you still need an all-round capable HTML (M as in content Markup) editor.

I'd still use nvi or Vim. Its significant benefits for basically *any* editing easily outweigh what minor benefits it misses relative to the HTML-specific tools, and anyway Vim can make use of extensions that provide more "smart" editor functionality.

QUOTE: This coder rejects using Markdown et al as a backward or at least sideways distraction.

Markdown (with a good implementation) is an excellent tool for some uses. It is not suitable to all uses. For relatively simple formatting, it works quite well and offers the considerable benefit of the source file being about as clear as actual plain text more so than other simplified markup languages, and thus far more clear and readable than HTML. In fact, if using Markdown syntax in plain text documentation files or emails (without any links), the end result is something that most readers who have not seen Markdown before would never recognize as being anything other than plain text in a common style of pseudo-formatting.

Anyway, I wasn't saying that "we use HTML editors less often, but they're more important", but maybe that's the case in general.