The newest version of Front Page is not heavy at all, and even has an “optimize html” option that can clean up old pages nicely.
It’s not the most important thing but code bloat can hurt a page’s ranking. Bots read code, not page text. Your code is where keyword density is judged, so don’t have all kinds of meaningless bloat in there for bots to have to wade through.
Again, Front Page 2003 is fine, even great, for building clean/lean pages.