I'm just a lowly grad student, but for my Master's thesis, I decided to sit down and learn TeX which just means reading through the TeXBook for a start. Know th

I'm just a lowly grad student, but for my Master's thesis, I decided to sit down and learn TeX which just means reading through the TeXBook for a start. Know thy tools, and all that. In fact, I ended up writing my thesis in plain TeX, and was able to write some nifty macros to solve exactly the kinds of "code reuse" problems you mention. Anyway, the whole exercise turned TeX from "arcane and painful" to "quirky but powerful" for me. I kind of enjoy hacking around on TeX now. Plain TeX library support is also surprisingly good. I used amstex for the document style and eplain for some commutative diagram and indexing stuff.