you're right stuart, scribus is not ready for many types of layouts.
of course, you can achieve (almost?) every result with scribus, but some of them are still too cumbersome with scribus.
on the other side, for many other types of layouts scribus does work well (enough).
before jumping on the boat, check if scribus can (easily) accomplish what is important to you, and make sure that there are workarounds for every need you have.
if it's not the case, go and look for a different solution. we won't be jealous!
if tables are so important to you, scribus is not a tool that will make you happy.
(for all the others: of course there are workaround for putting tabular data in a scribus layout... the forums are full with examples, how you can achieve it...)