It took more than one pair of hands to create that. First there was the CMS, with a layout engine written in tables in 2003. Then there were all the developers in between who never did anything about it, because it more or less worked -- and if you look at all the other sites using that CMS ( http://www.denverpost.com/portlet/layout/html/sitemap/mng_si... ) you'll see most of them don't have the same horrific time to render problem. Then there were the users of that CMS, who also use tables to lay out the pages. I think the list goes on.
Tools/languages/frameworks don't kill web sites, people do.