Played around with pure LaTeX last night and, while it's incredible for typing up revision notes/anything with creative formatting (e.g. margin notes and all that), doing a bibliography without pandoc seems almost impossible --- e.g. it took 30 minutes to find biblatex style files that worked with MHRA/Chicago (and even then it was iffy).
So it looks like I'll be on LaTeX for the fancy stuff, and MMD+LaTeX+pandoc for the academic work.