There are posts elsewhere discussing vertical centering and they all come back to HTML considering a page infinitely high and therefore having no identifiable center. Kind of reminds me of the question: "How long is a piece of string?"

The SVG solution I posted does work for images (at least on my Kobo) although if the image is smaller than the screen it will scale it up the way the code stands.

I agree with stripping out uneeded classes and divs. Calibre should just use <p> for your basic paragraph but it seems to always want to use <p class="calibre3"> or some such nonsense. If every paragraph is class=calibre3 then it is redundant. Grump. Grump. Grump...