> But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against.

That's why for anything custom, I prefer to use plain TeX, which is totally fine.

The TeXBook is a great tutorial on TeX, it's up there as one of the great comp sci books, in the same league as: "The C Programming Language".

I think people seem to scared of plain TeX, it's totally approachable and easy to use.