I found the memoir class frustrating to use when I was writing a technical manuscript (a botanical flora). It's great if you are willing to accept the defaults,

I found the memoir class frustrating to use when I was writing a technical manuscript (a botanical flora). It's great if you are willing to accept the defaults, but if you want to change things, the documentation is actually pretty spare. You can waste hours or even days tweaking and rebuilding your document to have it formatted the way you would like -- tasks that could be done in a lot less time in graphical page layout software like InDesign. I ended up composing my work in Word and then importing it into InDesign. That was a lot more satisfying than using latex for me, for writing that is not math heavy.