I had an interesting note from a gentleman who has been using TeX for about twenty years. He edits and packages books and creates indexes for them as well as part of his publication services, using TeX every day in his work.
He claims that LaTeX is "too confining and verbose"--and uses either plain TeX or ConTeXt. In fact, he believes that ConTeXt will replace LaTeX as time passes. I find that interesting enough that I will be looking at the various resources he suggests to learn more. However, I doubt that for my purposes another solution as attractive as LyX currently exists. Anyway, I thought those comments quite interesting, and the gentleman involved is enough of an expert that it may merit consideration. David
