Well, in my paper, like you, I'm criticizing (tag omission in) HTML5's table content models, and discourage aggressive use of it ([1]), so probably I'm not the one to defend it ;)
Even the HTML specification text itself got its tables wrong ([2]; also explained in [1]).
Apologies, I did not mean for you to be on a defensive. Just adding to the point. If anyone skipped your link, they shouldn't have. Thanks for sharing!
Even the HTML specification text itself got its tables wrong ([2]; also explained in [1]).
[1]: <http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html#start--and-end-element-tag...
[2]: <https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/6e305c457e42276bf275b8...