There are a lot of posts just like this, so I'll respond to this one.
Web code is simplistic, for sure, but how many hours have to be spent making a page render the same in IE4-8, Safari 2-3, Firefox 2-3, Opera, mobile browsers, etc.
I can code a beautiful page for any one, or maybe two, of those in no time. It's double the work or more to get it to render in all of them accurately. And all of this with solitary HTML/CSS/JS. Now I have be a DBA, I do program in C/Perl/Java/PHP, yet I have respect for the need to actually work knowledgably in HTML/CSS. It's not the code that's tough, it's how different the definitions of that simple code are across the ecosystem.