Well, the LaTeX approach is one extreme, the Word approach is the other extreme. Pretty much everything that somehow fits in between tends to be mostly one or the other. What's really missing is a plausible middle ground. What makes Word so attractive is that you can open it and start typing, and you can format things as you think of them. That sort of control feels nice. For LaTeX, what attracts me to it is being able to not care about format. Knowing this is someone else's problem feels nice. What's really missing is the middle ground. How about something where you type in text and format at will, then apply styles to (that actually work and make it look nice, unlike Word styles) and then apply tweaks to in word processor mode? And no, LyX doesn't do this. It does both sides of the divide badly. The closest I could think of is Scribus and the like, but those lose on the "just start typing" side of things.