As for references, it has it's own lightweight bibliography system out of the box, but there's a plugin[0] for BibTeX too, and DocBook has full-on support for BibTeX so it's just a matter of tooling. AsciiDoc gives you DocBook, and DocBook gives you pretty much everything.[1] The whole thing is completely extensible at multiple levels (macros, XSL stylesheets), so adding any essential features it doesn't already have is certainly much simpler than starting from scratch!