I really wish I had bitten the bullet and learned LaTeX in college. At the time, trying to actually write a research paper start-to-finish in Word was too pain

I really wish I had bitten the bullet and learned LaTeX in college. At the time, trying to actually write a research paper start-to-finish in Word was too painful, too prone to crash and lose data, and badly incompatible with using version control (CVS and SVN, at the time), and so I settled on a process where I'd write the whole thing in plain-text, and insert my citations in inline parentheses, then when I was all done, have to go back and try to format the thing in Word with proper footnotes and formatting. More than a few times, it took nearly as long to get that post-processing right for printing than it did to actually write the paper.