All true. Also, the way indexes, table of contents, bibliographies and cross references work in LaTeX are unholy, fragile hacks. Foot- and endnotes could use some TLC. And on 2011-era hardware we really should have some approximation of globally optimal page breaking.

Ugh, and fonts and character sets. Do you still have to put in magic incantations like

    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
    \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

to get working hyphenation with wacky characters such as æ, ø, and å?

LuaTeX does seem to be experimenting with some improvements in these areas though.

About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?