I think part of the story was that people wanted to write cross-browser code and that limited your tools to the bits of CSS that IE supported at the time. I doubt any system you could design, even tables, would be considered anything less than broken when a majority of the market was indifferent or actively hostile to it.

Even today I regularly think "I wish I could just use X", then I remember that my current project is targetting IE9+ and that means often I can. It gives me that same warm glow you get when you remove shoes that are too tight or stop banging your head against a brick wall.