Well I think the version with CSS looks moderately better. It feels less haphazard. Such a small quantity of CSS is not really going to impact loading times significantly either. </shrug>
I agree that it looks better, but a tiny bit better. The original has zero effort put in though, where the new version is trying. If you try and come up with something this bad (or this slight of an improvement), it's better to not try at all - imo.
Anything that made more drastic changes from the raw HTML look would be frowned upon on this website. That combined with the drop in requirement means it could never be too much of an improvement.