> It could do pretty much anything. Though, you may have noticed that I omitted addressing your first bulletpoint of "simple formatting", as I am not able to keep a straight face while calling LaTeX "simple".

One possible way of harnessing the power of LaTeX while keeping a simple formatting would be to use use `pandoc` and pandoc-flavored markdown. That keeps the formatting simple, while also making it easy to include references, equations, etc. and easy output to LaTeX/PDF/etc.