While I in no way play Rolemaster, I have dabbled in MERP a LONG time ago (18+ years??) I also was totally confounded by the shear number of tables. Personally, I rather like the generic vague nature of D&D's HP system. No thinking about "ok... last round, my arm was broken by the goblins hammer, now, whats my penalty to every action" ...

However, with that said with the proliferation and fairly ease of use in todays computers and software, you could easily automate tons of that if you so choose. Maptool has table support built in now, and with the latest dev build can now support table looks ups from within macros. I expect this would take any Rolemaster based game a one time set up and vastly increase the speed of combat resolution.