I think the problem comes from a lack of understand of the complexity of such a task. Vertical align text according to what? The easiest way to vertical align text is exactly how you'd expect it to be, and it solves the problem perfectly.

If you want to align text vertically, you just do

  font-size: 20px;
  line-height: 40px;
  vertical-align: middle;

What's the problem?

We already have one.

http://jsfiddle.net/gJP9k/

#vertalign {height: 50%; position: absolute; top: 25%; }

There you go. That CSS is useful for popup dialogs. Though most of the difficulties I see with vertical-alignment are due to poor design and implementation.

HTML and CSS get new features all the time so clearly nobody is saying they shouldn't improve. It's people saying that "HTML is inherently broken so there should be something else but they don't know what" that I am getting sick of.

CSS3's flex attribute solves that. It's the holy grail for modern web-interface-development. Vertical center text:

.vertical-text { display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; }

(add ´align-items: center´for horizontal center)

I know your pain, vertically aligning anything in CSS is quite annoying, unless you have a fixed width outer container. That being said, that's a problem with CSS implementation as it pertains to this one particular problem. The fix isn't to chuck CSS and HTML, but to keep improving it.

The question is whether you start over or make incremental improvements. Supporting a new layout doesn't seem like the kind of change that's worth starting over for.

That said, I'm all for experimenting.