Perhaps this post will clear it up for you a little:
Don’t feel bad, as I had issues in the beginning as well with this: when I started building templates, there was no such thing and everything had to be structured the way you did for Test 2 (I’m not sure on why you say it doesn’t has a table format? It does, and is perfectly structured like I would’ve done without stripnewlines).
I personally prefer stripnewlines and newlines now, and I continue to work like this with my one rule: a newline is added as soon as a new row is needed.
So, if you create a table within stripnewlines, you first line of code is not new - you just start with it. If you think of it this way, you should be good to go.
(of course, you’re not obligated to use this - but just look at our old templates, and you’ll see it can become quite complicated to read the code).
Hope this helps you out a bit?