I agree. You mention two problems that I both agree with. First, LaTeX wants to be so much, that it can be difficult to get simple things done. Second, LaTeX'

I agree. You mention two problems that I both agree with. First, LaTeX wants to be so much, that it can be difficult to get simple things done. Second, LaTeX's tooling is abhorrent. The quite useless error messages are just one example. Why, for the sake of whoever, would a user-facing tool require me to compile the source twice to get some references right? There is no valid excuse for that. The real problem here is that LaTeX is not what a document should be described in. LaTeX is a middleware that should be hidden from the user wherever possible.