We just threw an Open Office to ePub Convertor into fray. It goes by the name of
eScape. It does most of the advanced styling and formatting that is on the wish list above. Auto generation of OPF, NCX, etc. and free form modification of Stylesheets to create a book the way you want it to look. You can read about it and try it
here. It's completely free for non-commercial use, but not Open Source.
It's a different approach. Rather than try and interprete endless inline and para styles, we define custom Structure-Styles and you have to put those on. There is a growing
online tutorial here, so you can see if you can live with this different approach.
There are about 30 styles including drop & raised caps, small-caps, and lots of other blocks like epigraph, extract, notebox, code, boxed text, poem, notes, references, etc. All major book sections are predefined. If you want to comment, suggest please do so at our
Publishing With XML blog.