I’ll start with your initial concern: “If anyone can have the power to build an extremely functional, professional looking site, what of my future job opportunities as a web designer?”
Basically there are many levels of “web designer”. People have been producing what I will call “non-professional” web sites since the web began a few years ago. Everything from Word designed pages to simply copying the many templates available and dumping content in. But take a look at some professional web designers such as Andy Budd, Andy Clarke, Jeffery Zeldman, Dan Cedarholm, Roger Johansen, and many others I could provide you. These guys function at a much higher plain, and they do more than dump web designs out – they work with clients and users at a level that most of us only think about – getting at the core of what needs to happen to make a site truly user friendly and useful to the user. Some of them may even use a CMS occasionally to speed up production. But they understand the core coding extensively.
You can find jobs dumping content into CMS systems, as well as those that challenge you to design a web site expertly – yet use a CMS to accomplish it. Your design and ability to understand and apply user centered principles is what makes the difference.
Bye the way, their is a slight pay difference from the production “designer” and the one who is creating from scratch with knowledge of the industry, the user, and how to make a quality, semantic website that works. It depends on you which path you want to take.

CMS’s have been around for years, so have JavaScript libraries, CSS frameworks, etc. All represent talented people bottling their skills and making the products available – often for free. In general, a CMS requires someone who understands the backend of the system, most are not that simple. With some strong knowledge of HTML/CSS/PHP you can’t manipulate everything about them. If you have strong HTML/CSS/PHP skills, you may find a CMS that allows you to save time by beginning with their framework, and applying your design skills and technical experience to manipulate the CMS faster than building a highly functional site with backend programming.

But the key to what this is all about is that designing websites is not just a matter of cranking out code. As I mentioned before, it is the experience and understanding of the medium you are working with that makes the difference between a well respected designer and a production role. Design is about being mainly concerned with what the user needs are and how to integrate that with the best techniques and well-formed semantic code. It is about experiencing the current context – today the social web and Web 2.0 – and whatever tomorrow brings. The Fundamentals course was not about busy work with a lot of applications and processes – it was immersing you in the actual experience of what people do on the Web.

I really don’t want to defend AI and the money you are spending. I fully believe that each learner can grow and gain vital skill development if they choose to. Some are content to get a degree and be in the industry as production level roleplayers. Some choose to drive the web and become leading edge developers who can manage the entire process of developing a highly useful, fully semantic web application. The core processes are available to you here – but its your choice as to how you will use them.

We work only with CMS tools and we have a lot of designers and “HTML’ers” working with us. Developers? Just 2 or 3, no more. Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, etc, give the power to designer and don’t take off their jobs.

Don’t worry, we need them

Best

Ironically, what ended up happening was that the PR folks building the press releases didn’t want to have to learn anything newer than how to save a Word document, and so the CMS ultimately didn’t work as well as it was envisioned.

I do think that most major commercial sites will be run by CMS before too long, but I also think that there will always be a market for people who can manipulate the CMS and create the templates (ie build the HTML) that the CMS uses to generate the pages.

If you’re interested in scripting and HTML etc. then I’d learn it. A CMS can’t build the HTML for you – you need a designer/coder for that. The CMS just takes the designs that you’ve built and makes them usable by people who don’t know HTML and JavaScript.