I wrote the huxtable R package to output tables in HTML, Word, RTF and TeX, and TeX is more painful than all the others combined. Basic tables are less capable than HTML, and for anything more advanced you are quickly in a maze of competing packages.

I'm curious what sort of tables you have in mind. At large, tables that I would use for a report don't seem that hard.

Now, as soon as I'm reaching for packages outside of core, things change. But, again, as soon as I do that in any other package, heaven help me. We still haven't made our tables on our tools site align the numbers on the decimal point.

Rowspans. Coloured backgrounds. Non-standard borders. Vertical alignment (the LaTeX version of this does not do anything intuitive).

And if you ask TeX people how to do these things, they will tell you you don’t need to, at which point you will die a little inside.

I should add that I disagree that TeX has a good solution for decimal-point aligned columns. It has an absurd solution which involves dividing the column into two “columns”. As with many TeX features, as soon as you want to do this programmatically, it becomes a nightmare.(I don’t claim that any other markup languages are better at this – HTML still sucks for it - though Excel may do okay.)

I am probably more aligned with the folks that don't like colors and such. I hasten to add that for interactive and color screens, I change my mind.

Agreed that the TeX solution is bad if you want semantic markup of a table. If you abandon the idea of selective fields, it doesn't seem that bad to me.