Personally I went full circle on the issue. I did table layouts when I was a kid, then I learned the "right way" and fought great battles to make CSS behave. Then, after I did a bit of that stuff and saw others doing it, it dawned upon me that the whole "separating layout from content" is just a religious dogma, and like the best religious dogmas, those loudest about it are least likely to actually try and follow it. We've replaced clean tables with an ungodly mess of divs, which are placed in our HTML for the sole reason to provide CSS hooks - there's no semantic reason for them. This is not separating presentation from content, this is shitting presentation at content through a high-speed fan!

So nowadays, I look more favorably at tables again.

Well hey, you could always get the best of both worlds and use "display: table" and friends. :)

I never understood the point of this... If you want something to look like a table, why not just use a table? With html only content and design really matter...

User agents aren't necessarily graphical web browsers. Marking up a document fragment as a <table> when it isn't tabular data makes it harder for screen readers, terminal web browsers, and crawlers to do their job well.