Parade,
Thanks for the input.
In regards to the paragraph and break tags in the news, That is populated strictly from text entered by Admins on the site. As I'm sure you're aware, if you take a text area that allows multi-lines, and let people type to their heart's content, if you were to take directly what they typed and spit it out in HTML, the ASCII 10/13 chars would be stripped, causing it to all be one big paragraph of text.
The code simply takes the entered text and swaps out CrLf with breaks and paragraph tags in order to maintain the breaks in the proper location.
Hopefully that's passable for you, it's certainly passable to W3C. :P
I'll look into the colors and fonts, since I don't care much about that. I won't be setting a padding of 10-15 pixels for content, however, as that's entirely too much wasted space. Perhaps I'll go more than the current 3-5px I'm doing, but I won't go up to 10-15.
Feel free to mock up a version of the default page using divs only, if you like, and if it's not too much trouble, I can convert it over.
I like tables. I don't like absolute positioning on divs, as it makes highlighting content on pages look majorly sketch. At least from some of the examples I've seen.
Not everything needs to be the latest and greatest. sometimes the old workhorses do the trick. The page is xhtml compliant, with maybe a minor error here and there from a random tag I may miss. I'm not too terribly concerned with it.
I never need to preface people to not load my sites in certain browsers, because they're not compatable

haha... But again, thanks for the input. And if you make a div only version that works, that's totally fine with me.
Just remember, this is a cheesy guild website, and not something anyone is paying anyone for, however, so let's not go overboard in trying to dress it up too much.
Besides, there's a shitload of back-end content that's being developed, like a full-blown event scheduling app integrated into the calendar and such. I've been writing up library files to handle it and focusing on content and features more than presentation.
That's probably the programmer in me. You and I come from two different schools. C/C++ vs Actionscript. PC vs Mac, etc, etc... So we most likely will not see eye to eye on this one, I'm afraid.