> or my favorite is to export to latex+pdf, because everyone knows latex makes the most beautiful documents.

Hah, my observation from early days of using org-mode: LaTeX makes the most beautiful documents, but writing tables in them absolutely sucks. OTOH, org-mode has the most productive interface to plaintext tables that I've ever seen. When I was working on my BSc thesis, I would make tables in org-mode, and then export them as LaTeX to paste into the thesis code.