The "technical reason" for big gaps is an SP thing, but it's quite simple, actually. Normally, a new line in HTML will show up as just one space, and in addition, multiple spaces are condensed to just one.
If that would also be the case on SP, it would be more work to create readable pages, so, on SP, every space and every new line that's put in, comes out as well. Now, upon creating a table in HTML, to make the HTML itself readable, you'll want something like this
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<table>
<tr>
<td>...</td>
<td>...</td>
<td>...</td>
</tr>
...
</table>
There are lots of spaces here, and lots of new lines, and SP will show all of them, which creates a big white area!
A really cumbersome solution would be to create the table with something like this
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<table><tr><td>...</td><td>...</td><td>...</td></tr>...</table>
But that would be very inconvenient to maintain.
The <noformat> and </noformat> tags are not standard HTML, but specific to SP, and it means that whatever is between them, should be treated as HTML without the special SP treatment for spaces and new lines.
Mind you, if you
do want a new line inside a such a <noformat> tag, for example, in a bit of text inside a table, you have to use proper HTML for that: the </br> tag.
Ciao, Rob