I guess LyX must have improved a lot in the last few years. When I tried using it for my PhD thesis I had to give up after it refused to import classes and templates mandated by the university, and the documentation on how to deal with this issue was, well... open-sores level. I did use it to create a few snippets, later manually edited. It did not really save me any time.

Re other obscure software, Total Commander is a great Windows file manager, similar to the Linux Midnight Commander.