Sorry but unfortunately I don't have time to style stuff, nor to write a rather complex example of this, because I would have to extract it from my current code which would require a considerable effort.
Briefly described, imagine that i have a table that is rendered as uiOutput(). The table does not know how many elements it has, so it must be generated dynamically. Note that I am not referring to a datatable. I am referring to a hand crafted table with actual html markup. It could be a UL list, but for now I found a table a viable option. In practice, I suspect at the end it will be a series of divs, rather than a table.
Now, in this table, for each row, I have the value, and two comboboxes. However, one combo (the second) has a value and the allowed set of values depending on the selection of the first. Now you have a dependency of the contents of the combo. When you change the first combo, the second combo is updated, but this changes the underlying data in the model, which triggers a refresh of the table as a whole, because there's no way to isolate individual rows. Shiny can only refresh the ui element that is the whole table, which is dynamic on the number of rows.
The point is that if you have uiOutput, it can't act both as an input and as an output (or an output containing input elements that change underlying data that are then outputted). If you change the content of the table, it changes the underlying data, which triggers a refresh of the whole table.
That's what I am trying to prevent.