As for the redesign, the total amount of code (HTML/CSS/JS) you’d need to touch is still small. Do web designers still exist that only do HTML/CSS but no JS?
I hope so, given that most websites (as opposed to web apps) in existence should not need JS for core functionality.
That is really beside the point. HTML and JS should not be coupled to the extent that adding or removing some whitespace from the HTML will cause the JS to fail. This kind of things turns a trivial improvement into a nightmare, so you end up not daring to change anything.
Right now there's already nested tables-within-tables, just to work around how table columns work in order to handle indentation (and each row's indentation is handled separately with a stretched 1x1 image with a width attribute that's calculated server-side).