(Disclosure: Not an expert.) Standard LaTeX, meaning what exactly? Since 1983 there's been LaTeX2, LaTeX2e, and amsmath and the hundreds of packages that are now standard. The LaTeX used nowadays is a lot of stuff built on top of the improved later versions of LateX, which itself was built on top of Plain Tex (itself built on Tex).

I love how LaTeX/TeX is completely programmable, and anything particularly unreadable/messy can be made readable with user-defined commands, environments etc.