I think there's been some serious improvement anyway. Many examples on the Internet use outdated libraries and engines, but if you use modern tools like XeTeX a

I think there's been some serious improvement anyway. Many examples on the Internet use outdated libraries and engines, but if you use modern tools like XeTeX and Biblatex, things get better. For example, using a font with the Opentype features in Xetex and specifying another font for Chinese text is very simple, and since you can do everything in UTF8, there's no need to muck around things like inputenc anymore. Of course, there are still some ugly corners, and the underlying code isn't always pretty. Things like Luatex sound quite promising in this regard.