My issue with many Latex replacements is that doing citations is painful: Standard Markdown can't do them. Pandoc makes them really hard and confusing for some

My issue with many Latex replacements is that doing citations is painful: Standard Markdown can't do them. Pandoc makes them really hard and confusing for some reason. VScode's Markdown dialect doesn't support them. Texmacs makes you refresh your document over and over before you see them. With other replacements, I've encountered other problems: VScode's Asciidoc plugin didn't support inline formulas last time I checked. Org-mode had a steep learning curve last time I tried. How's Lyx for people?