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.