I must be weird, but I liked the pre-1.4 lyx better than the later revisions. Sometime between 1.4.x and 2.0 the previously functional keyboard shortcuts stopped working, and at the same time the same functions became available from menus and toolbar.

But oh my, did their graphical equation editor save me from a lot of headaches at university. I could produce a clean and printable version of absolutely anything, as long as I remembered to set the math mode blocks to be larger than the surrounding text segments.