"But using CSS only does not give me enough flexibility…"

Ya right!! If you believe that, then you do not know CSS.
CSS 2.0 has introduces a whole mariad of features to give you more control.

Just picking your node to effect is more powerfull. The following is right from the w3c site.

• * – Matches any element.
• E – Matches any E element (i.e., an element of type E).
• E F – Matches any F element that is a descendant of an E element.
• E > F – Matches any F element that is a child of an element E.
• E:first-child – Matches element E when E is the first child of its parent.
• E:link, E:visited – Matches element E if E is the source anchor of a hyperlink of which the target is not yet visited – (:link) or already visited (:visited).
• E:active, E:hover, E:focus – Matches E during certain user actions.
• E:lang(c) – Matches element of type E if it is in (human) language c (the document language specifies how language is determined).
  E + F – Matches any F element immediately preceded by an element E.
• E[foo] – Matches any E element with the “foo” attribute set (whatever the value).
  E[foo=”warning”] – Matches any E element whose “foo” attribute value is exactly equal to “warning”.
• E[foo~=”warning”] – Matches any E element whose “foo” attribute value is a list of space-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to “warning”.
  E[lang=”en”] – Matches any E element whose “lang” attribute has a hyphen-separated list of values beginning (from the left) with “en”.
• DIV.warning – HTML only. The same as DIV[class~=”warning”].
• E#myid – Matches any E element ID equal to “myid”.

“But I have to do all that extra typing since each item is diffrent…”
If you missed the fact that you can select more than one node from the above list, you can also group common aspects of a collection of nodes into a single CSS entry. There by reducing your typing.

Just go here: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html

“Why should I go through this if my content never changes?”
Simple, browsers do. What works on your site today, may not work on your site tomorrow.
Switching from IE 6 to 7 broke several sites. Some IT heads were scrambling to play catch up, so their sites would remain useful.

Also, a good CSS means you can use it on several pages, keeping your site looking consistant.

I’ll post more on this later, but I hope I have given you a good starting point.