I think you'll never be satisfied with LyX if you try to shoehorn LyX into something it is not, a LaTeX-editor.
You are right that most what is written about LyX is not written for people coming from LaTeX, this might be a shortcoming from the LyX community. But I guess the most important is that understand that LyX is not meant to write LaTeX, but documents. For one coming from LaTeX the biggest change moving to LyX would be the removal of the LaTeX markup from the document. The reason of removing the markup is to read and write the text more quickly, even math. If you find writing the markup and reading/writing the document a non-issue you should get a LaTeX editor, there are plenty. Even online: https://www.writelatex.com/ However, if you want to try LyX as a document processor here is some thought from your experience: The preamble is a bit tucked away, but usually you only change it initially, when you have set it up you make a template of the document and use that when you start a new document. If you have a lot of beamer macroes there is several ways to integrate those into LyX. you could make a layout-file that magically incorporates the macros into the preamble and give you the macros along with the rest of the beamermacros in the gui. Or you could make a template and add the macros in the preamble and use ERT to access it (however, as you remarked this will stand out from the rest of the document, as it is only meant as a last resort), or you could add them as local styles connected to the document, but integrated into the menus. What to chose is down to the type of macros, I guess. It is all about the best way of hiding the markup away. Ingar Pareliussen
