Andrej,
"I'd say that a properly handled textarea could be a lot more flexible than that." ... I also think so. There surely are a lot of designers using dreamweaver etc. but there will also be beginners and designers that just want to set up a certain amount of pages and use consistent style sheets etc. so that everything looks professional from the very beginning. The ability to define the input content by what it is supposed to represent and not by how it is supposed to be displayed is another pro for a textarea input. At least when you pre define classes that represent the different parts of a content page.
See: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=124009
