But Latex comes with a lot of liability too. > > It produces “dead” documents, whose faint attempt at modernity are clickable links.

That's because Latex is supposed to be used for printed documents. Printed documents don't care about clickable links.

It is incompatible with almost all but the most advanced information crawling and organizing technologies, for its lack of meaningful meta information.

So is my C code, word documents and those macos stickies. PDF document generated from a latex file can fullfill all your meta information needs though.

It is grossly non-interoperable with other modern scientific tools, and mainly it is unable to embed interactive (i.e. “non-dead”) content generated by other tools.

I'll try to remember that next time I am embedding lua and R code to generate lab reports.