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Acttually LaTeX has not been written by Donald Knuth, but it is a macro language built upon TeX by Leslie Lamport (which is also a very remarkable computer scientist, but I suppose he is not who you were thinking about).
Yes, the grammar is horrible, but once the basics of the language are mastered it feels quite a natural setting where to write text; if you want to implement a program in it, on the other hand, things are not so "easy". Look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2968411/ive-heard-that-latex-is-turing-complete-are-there-any-programs-written-in-late
This being said, the people at http://www.luatex.org/ are doing a really good job to integrate the engine of tex with lua and exposing its internals, as to offer a "reasonable" programming language both for tuning the typesetting and for actually implementing algorithms within the documents.

Wikipedia documents are supposed to be word processor documents.

Huh, I never got that memo. I thought it was a system for collaborative editing and mass distribution. In my own experience, I've always found WYSIWYG turns far too quickly into WYGIWYSW (what you get is what you're stuck with). And besides, the collaboration system depends on a diff tool with a human-accessible interpretation. It's not as if authoring is the only mission-critical task.

I started writing some WordPress posts recently in the visual editor, and man does that suck. A simple paste carries all kinds of format from the source document I usually don't want. When I press "undo" to use the clunky "text paste only" widget, the undo scrambles my window scroll position, and sometimes takes out a piece of my previous edit as well. It's a PITA to add text to a paragraph that ends with link text. CR SPACE BACK-ARROW BS FORWARD-ARROW seems to work to get me out of the link text format zone. This is better than raw markup? How, exactly?

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I've been following LuaTeX for some while. It's a lot of things, but compared to base LaTeX being a speed daemon is not one of these. Should be plenty fast enough for Wikipedia, though.

One thing that turned me off Wikipedia was the asymmetry of the quantification system: there's no way to add the statement "it has never been said that ..." to a valid article. Of course, this is not a problem if someone notable has bothered to make a trivial observation in that mode on the record, but surprise ... it turns out that notable sources often have better things to do than state the obvious. Kind of like Godel's theorem: in any attestational system, there is something blindingly obvious no-one has ever bothered to note for the record because it's too trivial to bother with. The same thing bugs me with peer review: positive results circulate, negative results vanish without a trace. I find it a burden to create balance working in a half a predicate logic, but I'm weird that way, let me be the first to admit it. In a way, a person of my temperament never really belonged there in the first place. I graciously retired when I discovered the fault was on my side, though I do still fix howlers whenever they cross my path.

I was also frustrated with how Wikipedia lost traction on leverage. (I don't want to belabour that just now.) Hopefully this is the beginning of reversing the tide.

From their FAQ.

Why not use language X instead of Lua?

We needed a language that matched all of the following criteria:

• Freely available
• Embeddable integrate within pdfTeX
• Very small footprint
• Portable
• Easy to extend with pdfTeX-specific functionality
• Fun to work with

Lua was the first language to match all the criteria. The known scripting languages tend to be much too large for our use. Specifically, we have rejected Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme on one or more of those criteria.

I think that one of the most important points is "Fun to work with". Lua is fun.

- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
  - one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
  - documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
  - graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
  - citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
  - There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
  - local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman

and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.

One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.

Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).

William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)

Regarding the awkward font mechanism, have a look at Xe(La)TeX: http://scripts.sil.org/xetex (or the upcoming luaTeX, http://www.luatex.org/).

For an experimental from-scratch replacement, look at Ant, http://ant.berlios.de/

Concerning bibliographies, the biblatex package is moving things forward (together with the many bibtex-aware bibliography managers). Graphics have gotten a big helper since the inception of the pgf/TikZ packages (for info about packages, see http://www.ctan.org/)

A lot of good editors are around to lighten the (not-so-heavy) code burden: emacs, kile, winedt, texshop, ...

If you want things to be simpler, but still get acceptably typeset (math/science) stuff, you're currently out of luck.

If the problem with TeX is in the extension language and not TeX itself, then the answer seems to be to write a better extension framework.
luatex seems to be a project well on its way to doing just that, but there's still a lot of work to be done before it's stable and usable.

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

Appropriately enough called ``LuaTeX'':

http://www.luatex.org/

Makes easy a lot of things which had required some bizarre texniques.

William