(Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com): I tend to agree. But then, I like my web pages ugly and functional.
My major concern is the ease of editing issue. I have nothing against good-looking tables and nice designs that make a page easy to read, but if it makes the underlying code hard to edit, it doesn't suit Wikipedia well.
There was a large amount of discussion about this a few months ago, and I proposed some simplifications to wikitext syntax that I plan to implement at some point; perhaps after I get some of the database optimizations done, since that seems to be a higher priority at the moment (I think we set a record this morning with 470 mysqld processes on the server).