Well, if it's your last resort, you are wasting a huge amount of your time and effort. Lazy Programmers -- and you do aspire to be one -- always use the quickest solution first.

I prefer w3m -dump over lynx for generating plain text from HTML. It handles tables properly. It runs CGI locally for testing HTML output.

If you are wanting text you can reformat easily, use the -cols option. It's your friend for stripping markup.