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Yes, but what about if I want to insert a few figures? I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page or to have a tiny bit of a paragraph show up before one or etc etc. I just want to say "put this figure here and this one here" but this is LaTeX so tough.

(I should add that I use and like LaTeX, it does let me produce beautiful documents from Emacs. But let's not pretend it's the answer to everyone's problems)

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I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page

Try

  \begin{center}
  \begin{figure}[ht]
  ...
  \end{figure}
  \end{center}

Also, LaTeX usually does a good job in placing figures (which, in professionally typeset journals/books, appear at the top of a page), and overriding it with [h!] sometimes makes a document look less readable.

Oops, that's supposed to be inside out:

  \begin{figure}[ht]
  \begin{center}
  ...
  \end{center}
  \end{figure}

Not sure it works the way I first suggested. Apologies.

This is my concern.

I'm trying to lay out a full magazine with a number of graphics in Linux right now.

I don't need WYSIWYG but I do need to be able to position graphics on a page and have the text "smartly" flow around it.

I've been using Scribus. It's OK but a system where you tagged text and could edit it will a text edit would be nice.

Have you tried Lyx?

Lyx is brilliant! It provides a GUI (not quite a WYSIWYG app) to LaTeX and provides all the nice exports you're likely to need. For those comes from a Word/OpenOffice background, using Lyx should be pretty intuitive.

Does Lyx have an odt import feature?

I'm not seeing it....

  \begin{figure}[h!] .. \end{figure}

should insert the figure right where you typed this.

Should, but often doesn't.

...usually when you shouldn't have tried putting it there in the first place.

Some people actually do know about proper graphic design and typesetting, and are capable of making an informed judgement in specific cases with better results than a generic mathematical algorithm. Unfortunately, neither LaTeX nor your flippant defence of its approach is helping those people.

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