I was wondering if it was able to "pop open the chassis" of web designer /website maker and reveal the actual html that the site was written in. This would help an awful lot.
For Website Maker: no. It's Flash based. To make the content accessible for search engines the program writes the text entered in an underlying HTML document, but it the browser basically just shows a flash film that you edit in the program surface.
For Web Designer: this program is meant for users who do not want to fumble around with HTML, so it's not a web editor where you can switch between HTML and WYSIWYG. The program supports HTML code (f. ex. for widgets) that you enter in placeholders. You can also export the site as an HTML document and continue tweaking it in an HTML editor, but that's more a workaround.