As a former physicist and LaTeX user, I find it hilarious that you refer to any others as "half-assed markup languages that never quite works as you want". I've

As a former physicist and LaTeX user, I find it hilarious that you refer to any others as "half-assed markup languages that never quite works as you want". I've found myself spending way too much time recompiling my LaTeX documents to get just the look I want. And I much prefer writing my first draft in Markdown, then pandoc it to LaTeX and finish. Takes much less time in my opinion.