very complex table--best way to implement it?

Nah you can't do that with Tablemanager and tbh, I doubt you'll be able to do it with any table creation utilities. It sounds a little bit too specific, I guess you might be able to do it with views but you'll be severely restricted with how you can present the table. It'll be pretty obvious how to get the data into it using views (table view, fields, etc) just as I said above, I think you'll struggle with column and row spanning.

Pobster

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It's a 'hidden' feature in a way as I can't be bothered with all the questions I'll get about it... Just enter || in a cell and it'll automatically be column spanned. Else... Just use attributes as you normally would inside a cell like [colspan=3] and then leave the rest of the cells blank.

Pobster
edit: Okay it seems that I removed colspan from the attributes function, to stick it back in find this function:

/**
 * Returns attributes if they're present
 */
function tablemanager_attributes(&$text, &$attributes) {
  $pattern = "/\[(align|axis|bgcolor|class|valign) *= *(\w+)\]/i";

And simply add it back into the list somewhere (anywhere) in the same way the rest are entered (...class|colspan|valign)

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Don't forget caching of the data.
This may cut down some of the heavier work with the database.
cck fields are cached automatically within the node, avoiding possible slow queries.

Now, samples of building a table with theme('table') are here: http://drupal.org/node/87367
In your case, the difference is that nodes will show in columns instead of rows.
To do this you need to keep track of the rows and columns to add the proper colspan and rowspans.
For example, $rows['genre'] instead of just $rows[]. This lets you add the colspan like:
$rows['genre']->$row[$last_row]->$cell['colspan'] = $current++;
Rowspans can be done in the same way, but you can also put a group of values in the same cell.