I'm going to cherry-pick your examples again and point out that sports scores actually an ideal use case for actual tables because they are generally actual tab

I'm going to cherry-pick your examples again and point out that sports scores actually an ideal use case for actual tables because they are generally actual tabular data. But frankly I just disagree when you say that a hierarchical tree isn't a mechanism for expressing general-purpose semantic relationships, when it's at least as good as spatial positioning on a page. In fact, I can use classes with semantic names which make my meaning perfectly clear to anyone reading the source. It might be invisible with a bad or default stylesheet, but that's a relatively easily resolved problem.