technically the second table is more space efficient than the first
I was referring to screen space.
Should Org understand all the 'concatenated text' as a single row (and not as multiple rows)?
In effect, yes. I'm proposing it as a syntax addition to make it easier to read, export, and manage, larger tables. I'm unsure if this would fit within the scope of org, but [[https://github.com/RedBug312/markdown-it-multimd-table][other projects]], like [[https://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-6/MMD_Users_Guide.html#tables][MultiMarkdown]] have exactly what I want in terms of table use. Since I've already proposed a single, solitary addition to org, we won't discuss all of those nice features /just/ yet!
