You don't seem to define exactly what type of frontend work is giving you grief. For the layout/design thing, there now exists quite a few drag and drop tools

You don't seem to define exactly what type of frontend work is giving you grief. For the layout/design thing, there now exists quite a few drag and drop tools to get a decent design. They also do code-generation, so you can modify the final thing. As far as SPAs and frontend frameworks go, perhaps it requires a change of thinking. There's also a lot of opinions among the framework-makers as to what is "best practice", so for the frontend framework part, the only way I think you might "enjoy" it is to look for the "it's inspired by Rails/Django/x-server-side-framework" situation.