I wasn't ragging on CGI's html methods because they don't
work in some way. I was down on them because separating
content and presentation happens to be a very good bargain.
Writing CGI's html methods to produce desired output is a
bad code factoring.
And it sounds like your company realized the same thing.
Yes, you use CGI's html methods. But you don't code them
up. Instead you autogenerate it from regular HTML. (And
presumably you could take the original, put it through
standard design tools, and then re-autogenerate the CGI
code. If you can't then take the energy to figure out how
to make that doable. You will make up for the
effort in savings on maintainance.)
That works. That addresses the objection squarely.