I agree - clearly a lot of work has gone into typesetting algorithms, but the language and package ecosystem is a mess, and there's not a good enough separation

I agree - clearly a lot of work has gone into typesetting algorithms, but the language and package ecosystem is a mess, and there's not a good enough separation of presentation and content. A lot of macros and commands should really go in the template rather than the document, a lot of others could be made redundant. Personally I'm a fan of markdown->latex->pdf using pandoc, although figure/table/equation numbering is still a bit of a hack (though there's wip plugins for them, or you can cheat with some embedded latex)