The default LaTeX Style is a no-nonsense, scientific paper like style, which is not really appealing for magazine like content or for literature typesetting. One thing I especially find boring is the table of content, which normally just lists the content.
I have been playing with LuaLaTeX. Looks already quite usable and you can now finally use all those ugly fonts you always wanted to use in a TeX document. But something usefull came out as well, a document class for publishing books with Blurb. No guarantee that it works, but it passed preflight. Now I only have to write a book to try it out.