I first decided to give it a shot when I was redoing my CV after the Oral Defense portion of my MA in early 2013. Like you, I spent the first couple of days cu

I first decided to give it a shot when I was redoing my CV after the Oral Defense portion of my MA in early 2013. Like you, I spent the first couple of days cursing BasicTex in all sorts of ways until it just clicked. The Tex Stack Exchange was a big help in solving some of the more complicated formatting conversions I needed to do. That said, I think that community in particular can be slightly hostile to new users because they will vehemently insist on a working example that people can run themselves in order to debug it. To your point that not as many people use it as probably could, this may have something to do with it. E.g, "My project doesn't typeset, is effectively "broken", and until you really think about it, the error messages seem inscrutable." I understand why this is the case, but if my problem is a syntax error - because I don't get how something works - this approach is...not helpful. At this point, with the exception of actual plaintext notes, just about every project I work on (words or code) goes through some kind of "compile" step, whether that's Rake/Make, npm scripts, shell functions, Markdown.pl, etc. It's just burned into my brain at this point and comes naturally when the work is done.