Wildly misses the point of why most people I know write in latex: It's the only way to get equations that don't totally suck. Yes I know word and libreoffice

Wildly misses the point of why most people I know write in latex: It's the only way to get equations that don't totally suck. Yes I know word and libreoffice can do equations and that these no longer look as ghastly as they once did but they still look pretty terrible and are annoying as all hell to produce (yes even in Word's latex mode) and in particular if you're writing something like a proof that includes text argument, equations, multiple lines developing concepts, stuff which needs to be aligned in different columns, multiple funky symbols etc, latex is the only reasonable game in town. It's also the linqua franca of equations embedded in things like jupyter notebooks thanks to mathjaxx. So having got to the realisation that you need to write equations in latex, writing other stuff in latex (as a means of learning to be good in latex) makes a lot of sense. Right now thanks to a small investment in getting productive I'm in a situation where I write my notes in obsidian so the equations are inline latex via mathjaxx, but I write submitted work purely in latex, and I'm for sure much more productive in actual latex than in markdown+latex-just-for-equations. It's much easier because you have the full power there so can define macros, include packages etc to your heart's desire. Now that's going to vary hugely depending on what you're trying to do but that's the case for me personally. I can see why in something like digital humanities (which is the author's field) it may not be so much of a lift because it's not going to be so equation heavy.