WYSIWYG is a terrible way of writing, but it's a great way of editing. The problem is that most modern tools conflate the two. When I write, I prefer to use vim and minimise the distractions - I see the words, I focus on the words and the markup describing their meaning, and I worry about the typesetting later. For articles, actually I don't worry about the formatting at all, my publisher sorts all of that out and so there's no reason for me to bother. I don't care what it looks like - that's not my job as a writer - I care that it's coherent and fluid prose. For books, I use LaTeX, and then I typically have a few rounds of iterations at the end of each chapter when I do the tweak-recompile-check cycle. I structure my environment such that I can build each chapter independently, which speeds up the build times, but it's still painful getting the style tweaks in correctly. I'd be much happier if I could get LaTeX to do a first formatting pass and then use a visual WYSIWYG editor to tweak everything and have those changes preserved the next time I do a formatting run from the source text.