I like textual markup formats and separated styling. But my experience has been that Latex is "unbeatable" when it comes to wasting countless hours fighting your tools. It is great in some ways, but incredibly bad in others. (Random placing of figures, unbounded reruns, incompatible package hell, no stderr / stdout separation, unfixable warnings bloat, ...)
I must have been lucky then, I've written several 50+ page documents with latex that included figures, footnotes, equations and citations and rarely had to do more than select a documentstyle and occassionally align multiline equations. The only real pain point were figure environments, otherwise I never adjusted any of the preset values and ended up with more than acceptable documents.
I'm currently writing my (150 pages so far) doctoral thesis in LaTeX. The "flafter" package helps somewhat with the placement of floats, but generally if you put your float definitions where you refer to them it does the "most sensible" job. It is after all having to place floats at the top and bottom of the page only, or if necessary on a whole separate float-only page, while using no more than \topfraction of each page at the top, \bottomfraction of each page at the bottom, and ensuring there is at least \textfraction of each page left to text. The default values of these variables are a little too restrictive, so one of the first things I do is redefine them, which allows LaTeX to put the floats in more sensible positions.
