To me, it looks like this is a tool mainly for people who aren't already comfortable and at home in the *TeX environment. As one of those people, I'm very inter

To me, it looks like this is a tool mainly for people who aren't already comfortable and at home in the *TeX environment. As one of those people, I'm very interested in what the syntax of this project ends up looking like. My few experiences with TeX were fairly frustrating, with multiple ways to do things (is it \bf or \textbf?) and a relatively large amount of boilerplate/magic incantations required to get a document up and running at all. Contrast that with Markdown, where the setup is literally "type what you want in a box and we'll format it for you in a reasonable way". There are more advanced features that require a special syntax (embedded code snippets for example), but they are included in such a way that you don't have to worry about them until you need to use them, and when you do they behave like you would expect. I know of course that TeX is incomparably more powerful than Markdown, but I don't believe that that means that the onboarding experience needs to be incomparably more complex. Easy things easy and all that.