I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future.

I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired?

I have my doubts it would really be an improvement.

For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.)

I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time.

(If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)