I would say that ignoring implementation dogma and going for the best solution to a problem definitely falls under advanced development. It's certainly not something you see coming from developers with a few flavor of the month tutorials and maybe a site build or two under their belt.
Gmail uses tables for the list of mails, which makes sense, but there are also tables for things like the logo. I'm not qualified to assess the work of the team behind Gmail, but it's curious notheless.