But then I guess that is all part of exploratory programming.
Tables are meant for tabular data, and when you use them for layout it breaks those semantics, which in turn makes it much harder for screen readers to make sense out of it.
It's also just ugly, in my opinion.
This turns out to be a relatively poor user experience.
Right now that kind of thing is intractable because there's no easy way to distinguish a table-for-data from a table-for-layout. I think it could be cool to have some way of putting something in your page HEAD that means: "In this page, tables are used exclusively for tabular data: you can activate your reordering features".