Since that question was asked for us a couple of days ago (as the creator of awless), let me tell you that the authors were and still are researchers in Computer Science in public institutions in France. I vet personally for Tom (cf. http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~hirschowitz/ ).

Patoline works well (PhD thesis were written using it) and the implementation in OCaml is nice and clean whereas the (La)TeX codebase is extremely complex.

edit: Funny coincidence, we were mentioning the Patoline project with the team last week.