It's not what it's designed for, but Eledmac has some interesting tabular features — https://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/co...
There's a good list here — https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12672/which-tabular-...
Also, with some care, the tabular environment can be made to work very well. Example —
% In the preamble:
\def\qfont{\usefont{T1}{AlegreyaSans-LF}{m}{}} % only here as used in example document
% In the body:
{\footnotesize
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}[pos]{| >{\qfont}c | >{\qfont}c | >{\qfont}c || >{\qfont}c |}
\hline
{\textbf{YEAR}} & {\textbf{PLATE OFFERINGS}} & {\textbf{ENVELOPES}} & {\textbf{TOTAL}} \\ \hline
1915 & 1,904.86 & 4,587.50 & 6,492.36 \\ \hline
1916 & 2,165.21 & 5,091.24 & 7,256.45 \\ \hline
1917 & 2,259.34 & 5,441.92 & 7,701.35 \\ \hline
1918 & 2,325.87 & 6,877.40 & 9,203.27 \\ \hline
1919 & 2,848.31 & 8,842.37 & 11,690.68 \\ \hline
1920 & 3,188.90 & 10,785.15 & 13,974.05 \\ \hline
1921 & 3,404.60 & 11,069.74 & 14,474.42 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
}
Also, as pointed out deeper in other responses, the basic tabular environment is not terrific when you're not just presenting standard table data.
Breaking apart the image and table and letting LaTeX handle the layout Just Worked (TM) and looked better in my opinion. That said, LaTeX images and tables are pretty easy and look great by default when you're not doing something weird with them.
Edit: A better way to phrase this might actually be that a major principle for LaTeX is that I should be able to just drop in a new chapter in the middle of a large document and LaTeX will automatically reflow and typeset the entire document without any of the very specific fiddling necessary in WYSIWYG word processors.
A major example is for instance, figures/images/tables will move to new pages but will remain correctly placed between paragraph X and Y. Because I've marked it up as such, if paragraph Y is on the page following paragraph X, it will bring the figure along with it to the new page. In WYSIWYG word processors, that figure would likely just sit at the end of the page until I manually moved it myself.
When you try to micromanage the layout of a very specific page, even if it's just the title page, you're going to have a pretty bad time unless you've written your own \documentclass. :-)
