@marijn I’m not sure if you saw the recent Oct 5 release announcement which allows using HTML & CSS to format the PDF output:
I don’t think it specifically addresses most of the concerns you listed and you still need to use javascript blocks for the type formatting issues you noted. HTML is also worse from a readability perspective. However, I feel it does give you alot more control on the overall layout and styling of your output.
There are still a few areas for improvement IMHO, but this is still quite a great leap forward for this type of use case.
Hope this is somewhat helpful 