I prefer to produce documents using LaTeX (and other TeX friends), and draw figures using MetaPost. A long, long time ago (when I did my PhD), I even created a MetaPost package, aaobj (documentation).
Recently, I have moved towards using the Lua implementation of TeX more and more (see also the LuaLaTeX documentation). I will not discuss why in details here, but one of the reasons is that inline M …