I recommend LaTeX for typesetting and emacs for editing (it's not WYSIWYG, though). I found the MIT thesis templates to be extremely easy to use and produced excellent output with minimal hassles. (My thesis was just an undergrad thesis, with a relatively small number of figures. I will admit the figures were the most difficult part, but even there they were totally manageable and I never considered myself locked in any death fight.)

It was 17 years ago that I wrote my thesis, but I quickly googled and found some samples online: http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/Sample-thesis/index.html