I really appreciate all of the responses on this and I am thinking through each one considering the possibilities in order to come up with the best solution.
The truth is that I can always make my own template and do exactly what I want. With that said, I can do so much right now with the standard, or a standard, template that I like the simplicity. It just seems to be missing access into the row.
I do use the suggestion by Gustaf of classing the table to do things like attach drag and drop capability and to stripe using nth-child (in some of my custom templates I removed the odd-even standard classing because I need the dynamic striping in drag and drop scenarios.)
One use case I am working with is that I want to highlight each record / row (in whatever structure you can envision) with a color based on data for that record.
Another is that I want to add a custom attribute to the row (still, in whatever structure you can envision) so that I can grab that piece of data for the row and act on it via JavaScript.
I could place these kinds of things in a specific element/column via the html attribute of one of the list elements and then use JavaScript to place them where I want, but that defeats some of the benifits of what list builder does for me, get the html in a state that the browser can simply display it. No messing with the DOM. When this happens well even large amounts of data display lightening quick!
Thoughts?
-Tony