Excellent post; thanks for putting this together. You could also enable smart quotes while writing, and then set up replacements for “ -> `` and ” -> ‘’ and etc. You’ll probably want to also escape a few common characters with replacements as well, like &.
There are a few other tricks you can use. Use the Formatting pane to assign binder titles to LaTeX headers. Since Scrivener allows multi-level rules, you could go from part down to subsubsection, with everything below that point being emitted as an sss. Meanwhile you should be able to create a custom meta-data field for the section label and emit that in the title suffix as well, like so:
For some reason it isn’t evaluating though; I thought we fixed that. Hmm.
Well, at least the title part works. Just add “\section{” for the prefix and “}” for the suffix.
Also take a look at Separators. Those can be awfully handy for inserting procedural items. In fact MMD inserts a \pagebreak command when using the MMD->LaTeX command, if you set any of those to page break. Similar ideas could be used here, such as inserting a nice divider between text sections.
One thing that is already on the table for consideration is allowing you to adjust the prefix and suffix for footnotes in plain-text. This would allow you to use Scrivener’s built-in footnote feature to write footnotes, and then compile them with \footnote{} syntax. I’m not sure what the status of that feature request is at though.