In the early days of web, tables were the goto for layouts with Web1.0. They could get really complicate so Macromedia's tools using Fireworks to slice the images and Dreamweaver to manipulate the HTML were great places to start. But as you said, after doing it enough you start to see all of the baggage/weight that these tools added to the HTML. I eventually got to the point of writing it by hand which would eliminate all of that extra "crap" that these tools added. Every byte saved was very important during the days of dial-up.