I thought "the standard LaTeX approach" is that you put all of the style information into a document class (or, if you have only minor modifications of a standa

I thought "the standard LaTeX approach" is that you put all of the style information into a document class (or, if you have only minor modifications of a standard document class, into a package) and then all of the content in a separate file with extension .tex. I not only thought that was the standard LaTeX approach but also that that was the point of LaTeX: your document markup is semantic and all formatting issues are decided elsewhere so you can change them independently of the content. (And whether or not that is the standard LaTeX approach it is certainly a possible and recommended approach in LaTeX.) In your approach you don't just separate style from content, but additionally distinguish two types of content (the type you'd write in YAML files from the type you'd write in Markdown). That is different from LaTeX, where both the YAMLly and prose-like things are put in LaTeX source files (for the YAMLly stuff you define macros, like \author, \title, \signature, etc.). At any rate, as I said before: preferring YAML and Markdown to LaTeX syntax seems to me a valid reason for doing things your way. I just wanted to point out that LaTeX makes it easy to separate form and content, too.