Just a comment here, not a solution. A problem is, as stated, that open office produces very poor latex. It seems that the goal of the designers of the translation module was to make the latex output resemble the formatting of the open office document, rather than making the contents the same. That is, they are trying to 'finger-paint' with latex, directly opposed to the philosophy of LyX.
I tried to use open office to convert MS Word documents into lyx (MS Word->OO->Latex->LyX), but had to give up because the latex produced by OO was so poor.
