It's weird that I see many people complaining about tables because of pairs/ipairs or trivial stuff like that, which are more nuisances than anything. The flexibility of tables/metatables make them a very powerful data structure (not unlike javascript's prototype). I've been playing a bit with it for game development and you can build some very powerful stuff just using tables.
Maybe instead of trying to use lua as another language, you should totally embrace "the lua way" and then you'll understand why their tables/metatables is the way it is.
Maybe instead of trying to use lua as another language, you should totally embrace "the lua way" and then you'll understand why their tables/metatables is the way it is.