I use rst for everything due to using Sphinx heavily. Trivial tables are easy in any markup, but non-trivial ones are a pain. I use table mode in emacs, but we can't require everyone to use emacs.
I hate its URL handling.
And of course it needed Sphinx to make it work across more than one source file which means we now have two dialects.
I do wish everyone would just agree on one syntax and be done with it.
Regarding the URL handling, I also used to hate it, but wrote a tool to make it easier to deal with; details are here if you're interested (despite the title, the relevant tool is not Vim-only): <http://tadhg.com/wp/2012/10/07/tools-for-writing-restructure...;
The bit I hate is that I have no desire to have a global list of URLs and manage them. So instead I have to put a double underscore suffix after every url otherwise you get bizarre error messages. eg `foo <foo.com>`__
Have you tried using the list-table directive? I find it's a much easier way to create tables - it's based on writing indented lists which mirror the logical structure of the table (i.e., table / row / cell), rather than trying to produce ASCII art.
All my doc is in Sphinx so I play it safe, and all directives need to be supported in whatever version of docutils and rst2pdf are installed across the various developer machines. So for the moment I am stuck with ascii art.
I hate its URL handling.
And of course it needed Sphinx to make it work across more than one source file which means we now have two dialects.
I do wish everyone would just agree on one syntax and be done with it.