"any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX"
Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too.
That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard, it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results are fantastic.
As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.
It even has a LaTeX-backend but I imagine the impedance mismatch must be problematic (I have not tried it).
However, realistically the problem will probably just solve itself in the midterm. Paper is rapidly going out of fashion after all, and so will anachronisms like universities requiring their students to submit content in arcane file formats.
Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too.
That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard, it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results are fantastic.
As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.