maybe a reboot is in order, and CSS4 could ditch backwards compatibility?

It shouldn’t be !important — that reads to engineers as “not important”. We should have picked another way to write this.

Maybe @important. Alternatively @specificity(0, 0, 0) with custom values. And allow it to be applied to both rules and selectors. That would have been cool.

I know it’s bad practice to use !important anyway, but a quick way to customize specificity inline is useful for testing.