[richard_todd]

Wow, I was initially very enthusiastic about lout, and I still think it had some good ideas. I just remember the templates not being as easily hacked/tweaked as (La)TeX, and the advice was generally "accept how it already works" when people asked how to adjust things. Not a good sign. Also I remember--at least I think I do--that the source files had arbitrary f01.c f02.c f03.c names, so it was hard to guess where anything was. That was strange.

[bombcar]

That's been my experience; either it's a beautiful template that does almost everything you ever wanted, but if you want that last 1-5%, you're doomed, or it's just another LaTeX-style tool that may be objectively better in some way, but it's fighting against 25+ years of experience getting LaTeX to do exactly what I want it to do (and providing quite sane defaults when I don't care).