"I conclude that appearance/aesthetics is the dominant reason for widespread adoption of LaTeX". I fully disagree. IMHO, the dominant reason is that Micro

"I conclude that appearance/aesthetics is the dominant reason for widespread adoption of LaTeX". I fully disagree. IMHO, the dominant reason is that Microsoft word has been a nighmare for scientific documents. The different generations of equation editors were buggy and incompatible. You can not edit an old document using a recent version of word. You can not exchange documents with people using a different version of word. For most people, when you can not use word, the only choice for scientific documents is LaTeX. Even if recent versions of word are less buggy, people will migrate slowly.