For me LyX hits a sweetspot: it does 95% of what I need to do in Latex without ever having to type a backslash (or having to lookup whatever amsmath command is used for setting a matrix). But when I do need to drop down to latex to do something unsupported, I don't need to fight lyx.

I wrote my paper and master's thesis with a workflow involving LyX, LaTeX and python (scipy, numpy, mpl, doit for building the whole thing). The doit script ran the analysis pipeline, exported the figures, exported a .tex using the LyX CLI and ran all the latex/bibtex stuff to generate a PDF and and zip with all the necessary stuff for submission.

My colleagues looked at me weirdly (mech. engineering department), but I think it was worth it. Probably not time efficient, but at least for the peace of mind.

Yes, LyX is an excellent way to get a feel for LaTeX without having to learn the syntax.