I agree that these are the main issues with using this kind of component. However, most of the time there is no need to fork the component and, if you actually need things that the component doesn't allow, then it's the time to do it yourself. Because that doesn't always happen, if the component is easy to use it often is worth to go with it and only do the additional work if you need it.

> or the configuration expands to be its own little akwards DSL with very surprising edge cases.

This is the crux of the matter. However with this particular library, the configuration is extremely reasonable, simple and readable. It would be no problem to refactor the code to use the very same configuration to create your own table.