Google Docs – Easy Way to Convert Text Lines into Table Rows

As far as I know it's not possible to remove the line before and after the nested table. The good "news" are that now is possible to merge cells.

References
Add and edit tables - Docs editors Help
Merge cells and wrap text - Docs editors Help

It looks like Google is going to be rolling out an update which is supposed to fix the issue. In the meantime, I ended up using a workaround which was satisfactory for me, though a little extra time-consuming. I read a few places about "soft returns" AKA "manual line breaks" which is what happens when you do a Shift+Enter (or Shift+Return). I had heard of these before but never knew what practical use they had. I replaced all the vertical whitespace-creating line breaks (wherever I had previously hit Enter on a blank line) with Shift+Enter soft returns and when I copy-pasted the document into the text editor this time it did not add the extra line breaks. I was thinking about trying to do a search and replace with regular expressions to save myself all the manual edits but now it looks like I may not have to if the update works.