Is a successor for TeX/LaTeX in sight? [closed]

Answer 1

I have only skimmed through it, but Emacs Muse http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html might be interesting (I'm interested if any one has more experienced with it. I like the idea of generating to several backends, latex, texinfo or stuff.)

Answer 2

org-mode, an Emacs extension, is able to generate LaTeX and PDF files. org-mode syntax is similar to Markdown. It's just readable. There are only several LaTeX code lines inside the 20KB document. org-mode resolves three problems you mentioned - you get all the awesome features from LaTeX and get rid of its ugly syntax.