Sometimes these "idiosyncrasies" are quite relevant: LaTeX is still 8 bit and uses a number of fixed-size tables for managing objects (resulting in a numer of "

Sometimes these "idiosyncrasies" are quite relevant: LaTeX is still 8 bit and uses a number of fixed-size tables for managing objects (resulting in a numer of "weird" limitations), the way TeX processes documents is quite complex and not particularly fast (depending on what you compare it to), it only supports it's own fonts and none of the industry standards and so on