Comment by xelxebar
8 years ago
This sentiment is basically the default from my experience and one I know all too well myself. It's a lot like makefiles and shell scripts in this way.
I can't really comment on what Knuth did right or wrong, but for me reading The TeXBook pretty much made Tex fun where it had previously felt arcane and frustrating. I'm convinced that overall the few hours invested there ended up saving me more hours of frustration on my masters thesis.
It seems that there's room to say that we should learn our tools before cursing them. Typography is surprisingly subtle and fraught with challenges, and I'm not yet convinced that it's a problem that can be made to Just Work in all cases.
I don't mean to knock it in general. It produces beautiful documents and it's immensely powerful (and the syntax isn't that gnarly once you get used to it).
I wrote my own thesis in Latex and would do it again in a heartbeat. But it really lacks popular appeal.