Optimized for IE used to be what the cool kids did because it supported iframes before Netscape and all of a sudden it wasn't a big deal to use frames in that way. It took a while before div based layouts actually were easy to get working in most browsers to the point where most people stopped using Photoshop and cutting everything into borderless tables.
I'm not afraid to admit that I still do table-centric HTML design on occasion (disclaimer: for specific, usually non-public, uses); it's really not all that much worse semantically than the current trend of "oh I'll assign a grid-three-seventeenths-or-whatever-the-fuck CSS class to this div in WangularStrap.js", considering that in both cases you're embedding formatting information in the data being presented (and therefore totally missing the point of "semantic" web programming).