> Comparing good use of LaTeX with poor use of word processors is unfair; the most that can really be said is that you are more likely to be introduced to LaTeX

> Comparing good use of LaTeX with poor use of word processors is unfair; the most that can really be said is that you are more likely to be introduced to LaTeX in a class taught by someone who really knows how to use it, and more likely to be introduced to a word processor by playing around with it or under the informal instruction of someone who doesn’t understand it very well, and that, for this reason, the number of people who use LaTeX but don’t use its document-structuring features is probably close to zero while the number of people who use word processors and don’t is enormous. I agree with this very much. My husband and I wrote our Masters theses with LaTeX so that we could support various layout features with relative easy. I created a LaTeX template, and all we needed to do was write our chapters and sections in separate files. A bash script parsed the template and chapter files twice, and spat out a nice PDF. Oh boy, did I ever get my butt kicked by the hassle of LaTeX support for custom CJK fonts. Oh good, just use that package. Oh no, that package doesn't work unless you use that engine. No, that engine doesn't support custom fonts, use a different one. Oh no, this other engine doesn't support that package, but here's a similar package whose arcane settings you need to tweak just right. It took nearly a week for me to get my template to match the university style guide without throwing hissy fits after each compilation — and then I added BibLaTeX to the mix, and it's a wonder the wall doesn't bear an imprint of my head getting my inline APA references to respect those font and layout choices, too! For our purposes, just writing our theses in Pages would've been a hundred times simpler. After we submitted our theses, I created a Pages template, modified all the paragraph and character styles, set our preferred fonts with CJK support, checked that the line heights were consistent, double-checked the paragraph and line spacing, saved the template, and we've never looked back. I'm with the author in that I'm absolutely fine with sane defaults, and I'm sure most people are, but sane defaults for an international world. I'm glad scientists and engineers have an easy way to typeset complicated equations and what have you, but it's such a pain in the neck to (a) support non-ASCII characters (b) in a font that you like (c) with consistent line height when using CJK fonts. Just my two cents as a non-scientist who really loves the power of LaTeX but obviously has different needs to most of its users in support of the author's message that writing documents in LaTeX is not some universal ideal for every writer.