Escaping drastically complicates parsing (though not as much as quoting, thank god). But you seldom need to nest tables within tables. Much more frequently, table values want to contain embedded newlines.
Don't get caught in the CS trap of thinking you need a completely "general purpose" parser, when a slightly-less-than-completely-general parser will be significantly easier to write, simpler to understand and debug, and faster to execute. And as mentioned above, if you do find yourself needing more than this parser, then you should be looking at non-parsing based approaches anyway.