I didn’t find it an issue either. However, I’m suspecting the author may be using it as a “document first” tool as opposed to a typesetting one. As an example,

I didn’t find it an issue either. However, I’m suspecting the author may be using it as a “document first” tool as opposed to a typesetting one. As an example, I had a rough draft of my thesis on paper along with the formulae that I wanted. I iterated over the LaTeX doc after that. It wasn’t slow and the good thing is I had different files for different chapters. I used Texmaker - open source, free and worked on Linux.