Hi Nicolas, thank you for your detailed answer!

To be honest I was wrapping my head around this until late tonight when it
all suddenly made sense and I more or less concluded the same you explained
about the role of each block and was going to say that you could indeed
dismiss this request.

Nevertheless there is one area I still believe that could be improved which
is native fontification of inline code. I almost got it by advicing
org-do-latex-and-related so that it does the equivalent of:

        (org-src-font-lock-fontify-block "latex"
                                         (+ offset (match-beginning 0))
                                         (match-end 0))
        ;; (font-lock-prepend-text-property
        ;;  (+ offset (match-beginning 0)) (match-end 0)
        ;;  'face 'org-latex-and-related)

That correctly fontifies latex if org-highlight-latex-and-related includes
'latex. The problem is that once you break the beginning of the
environment, say by adding a space so that "\begin" -> "\be gin" or
whatever, all fontification is lost for the entire environment and never
reapplied, no matter whether it became valid latex again afterwards or not.
The next statement in org-do-latex-and-related is:

        (add-text-properties (+ offset (match-beginning 0)) (match-end 0)
                  '(font-lock-multiline t)))

But this doesn't seem to help keeping font locking in sync. I will dig
deeper into emacs font locking mechanism until I get this working but,
since I'm no expert, maybe you can point in the right direction and spare
me some time.

A missing feature is still not a bug, i.e., feature requests are not bug
> reports.
>

I understand this, I just followed the instructions in the manual and
thought org-submit-bug-request was intended for everything feedback
related, so sorry if I should have written directly to the list or maybe
removed the Bug: prefix in the header.

Regards
--
Carlos