yesno,

contrary to your assessment, Scrivener absolutely excels at academic writing for me. I am an academic writer and switching to Scrivener just saved my current book project, or at least cranked up my productivity on the project to a point where I can actually finish it in time. I love the way Footnotes and comments show up in-line in Scrivener. I used to rely heavily on styles, but have found that I spent much more time worrying about formating in the drafting stages that way, time that would have been much better spent doing the actual writing. I use four custom styles in Scrivener now and they are enough for my book—which of course relies heavily on footnotes as well. Formating is the least of my concerns. I can pay someone to do the formating if I’m in a pinch—but the writing I have to do myself. And Scrivener excels at that as no other program I have tried does. Contrary to popular belief, academic writing IS creative writing, just creative in a slightly different way than a novel or a short story would be.

But, as with all creative tools, Scrivener is not for everyone and does not need to be. It just hits the sweet spot for a lot of creative writers— journalistic, fictional or academic. And we tend to be quite passionate about it too. :-)

Just my 2 ¢ (Euro).

J

UPDATE: I should have clarified that relying on styles and fiddling with formats is not necessarily causally linked. Just the programs that do have full support for styles (such as Word or Pages) encouraged me to do such fiddling. I intend to use Multimarkdown in Scrivener for my next project.