Hi. I probably can be of service to you. I am a programmer and have a fair bit of experience with markup systems. The first thing I can tell you is that docbook is a hell hole (been there done that), and you are right to want to find a better way. Problem is, as you have no doubt discovered, that *good* options are in short supply. Available solutions are either too complicated and time consuming and likely to lead right back to fresh hell hole, or they are too simplistic. What you need is a "goldilocks" solution.
While Sphinx looks like a promising choice, it falls a just a bit into the too complex category. It is also not really geared for this sort of project. It is primary for documenting Python projects. So it's likely you will find it a bit too constrictive too.
A better solution is Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) Pandoc will allow you to do just about everything you need in the simplest way possible. And the nice thing about Pandoc is that if there is something you need that it can't do, it supports plugins, so it can be added with just a bit of programming skill. Basically what you want to do is convert CLL to Markdown and take advantage of the plugins in the places that the standard markup doesn't cut it. Read about those here: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html. If there is anything you can't find a way to do then let me know and I can see what I can do, if need be make a new plugin for it (though I actually doubt there is anything you'll need that isn't already covered).
.trans.