Yep. It's exactly like that for me. And the packages interact with each other in surprising and unexpected ways, and you will almost always end up researching

Yep. It's exactly like that for me. And the packages interact with each other in surprising and unexpected ways, and you will almost always end up researching some strange 80s-era TeX commands that are still in there. And nothing is well documented and you will spend way more time on it than you should. But it's still better than writing it in *Office, I guess.