You're right, everything else I can think of is worse for data, tables are pretty good for that (minus the weird vertical centering thing that sometimes happens in cells.)

But seeing tables being used for layout annoys me far more than the blink tag.

I'm using SlickGrid[1] in an internal tool. It uses divs and spans to display data, so there are certainly nice examples that do so.

1. https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid