I'm no purist but I am in the mindset, "you wouldn't use a fork to eat soup".

I do agree though that it is a pain when something is easily achievable in tables but doesn't work in normal CSS. Vertical alignment being one of them.

What does annoy me is when you see people creating "CSS table" systems. I'm not being funny but that is just plain stupid. I saw a whole project dedicated to replicating the behaviour of a table.

I started developing when tables were fine to use for all layouts and I feel CSS was adopted as a layout too early without some very basic things being answered.