Thanks a lot for all this, I will follow your advice.
One final question: Will any of these packages spoil the fun for
people who want to process through .dvi instead of directly to pdf?
Not as far as I know. hyperref and microtype will run with reduced
features, but apart from that, there should be no problem. Regarding
microtype, I do not know what happens when it is used with the old TeX
or eTeX compiler that was used to created dvi's before pdftex was used
for this too, but that should largely be an academic problem as pdftex
is now used anywhere.