It's really unfortunate that LaTeX and friends seem to be the only options for document typesetting with anything vaguely complicated. There are just so many quirks and oddities; many times I feel like error messages might as well be written in another language, and the syntax becomes ugly fast. Personally I haven't had much luck getting into LuaLateX or XeLaTeX, but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has found those to be worthy alternatives. Having looked into LuaLaTeX a bit, it seems there are a lot of odd quirks there as well.