I find complex tables frustrating to read and write in AsciiDoc. The markup can be written in a way that visually does not resemble the resulting table at all; newlines within cells (apparently) require actual newlines breaking “one row per line of markup” intuitive mapping; syntax errors or mismatched col/rowspans are difficult to spot; and so on.

    h|row 1 |foo .2+|bar |baz 5+|newline +
    inside cell |last cell
    h|another row |bar .2+||||
    ...

I actually prefer reStructuredText’s approach[0], which while being a hassle to edit, at least ensures table markup visually resembles the result.

Overall I feel like having to manually edit a complex table is often a sign of a flawed process somewhere, and should ideally be eliminated—author data in a structured way, and render it as a table automatically. (In the end it depends, of course.)

[0] https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/user/rst/quickref.html#...