I respectfully disagree that LaTeX is "the correct tool for people that want complete control over their document formatting" - in my view, LaTeX is for when you don't want to think about formatting at all - because it automatically formats things.
Something like Adobe InDesign is for when you want complete control over your document's formatting. (InDesign is actually a quite good word processor.)
I was wondering when InDesign would come up in this thread. It is completely badass. It has layout/design power in spades. If you want to spit out an invoice or write a paper for school, use Numbers or Word. If you want to professionally layout an annual report, illustrated book or magazine (think Motor Trend, Cosmopolitan, or The Economist) you do it with InDesign. Most of those magazines likely use InDesign for in house layout.
On a side note: InDesign is a pretty powerful wire framing tool for web and app development because of it's robust support for styles, page templates, and linked graphic resources. Like much Adobe software, you can spend a lifetime mastering it.
I see what you're saying, but I personally use LaTeX for fine control of layout; I've spent a while writing a bunch of custom style docs that are tweaked out to my exact specification. It seems like this is what the author is trying to do with his applescripts, which was my point.
Good point about InDesign, though, if you want to do this kind of layout manually in a graphical environment. It's powerful software indeed.
Something like Adobe InDesign is for when you want complete control over your document's formatting. (InDesign is actually a quite good word processor.)