Yup. Figured out column/cell spans in reportlab, found old rst2rst code that regularizes the table row/columns to be all the same number of elements, and voilá, tables work, including examples like this:
+---------------------------------+
| header |
+==========+======================+
| | tr |
+ tl +------------+---------+
| | c | br |
+----------+------------+ +
| bl | |
+-----------------------+---------+
Which generates nicely on PDF now. See it
The bad side is that it's now not a single file anymore, so I am needing a place to host SVN and whatever, because it's turning into a real project... and googlecode doesn't let me start more stuff.