"Dependent on" ???

"Dependent on" ???

I haven't had to mess with heavy math stuff in a while, so I'm not entirely up on all the
issues you mention, but then most users, free software or not, haven't either.
Specialized applications are a bit different from a web browser.

That said...

You could do your writing in OpenOffice or Kword, though of course TeX is much better
suited to math. There's also groff, but that syntax is even more ancient and ugly than
TeX. LyX may also be of assistance. Finally, it seems that a simple preprocessor script
would work wonders here, translating accented letters into TeX notation.

Does SciLab help with the Matlab-type stuff? That's an area where you might have to be
the one to step up and improve the existing tools. It's also an area where there are
relatively few people even using the tools (compared to GIMP, for example).

EGCS ended up becoming GCC. I don't see that it matters much that compiling code
takes longer than it used to, if the resulting code runs faster. I believe there has been
lots of work on the optimization in recent years, which is actually why compiling is
slower.

GIMP -- see Krita.