As for the over-engineered part: I usually try not using spans or similar in markup to separate short terms or phrases, where there's a change in meaning or the level of information, rather using emphasis (<em>) for this. 99% of the time I end up styling this as italics. Because, this is really what typographical emphasis is all about.

P.S.: And I always failed to recognize the crucial difference in meaning of "bold" and "strong". Both in speech and type these are quite the same concept to me, "bold" may be even be a bit more general and specific at the same time. (E.g., "bold" is not shout, but it's about a general concept of raised importance, which isn't clearly expressed by "strong".)

No semantic web person would have said <strong> and <em> “replaced” <b> and <i> except for the specific cases where <strong> and <em> are semantically appropriate. For example, italicizing ship names with <em> has always been wrong.

As McLuhan said, the medium is the message