Have you tried LyX? It doesn't have all the advantages of plaintext and it's still easy to get distracted, but I find it's quite good at getting out of your way

Have you tried LyX? It doesn't have all the advantages of plaintext and it's still easy to get distracted, but I find it's quite good at getting out of your way when you're not too worried about specific formatting, and it still has all the power of LaTeX when you need it.