I can relate all too well the procrastination involved in fiddling with the typesetting engine! When I was writing my bachelor's thesis (in Philosophy, nonetheless!), I spent an inordinate amount of time on tweaking my LaTeX template and workflow.

I ended up falling way too deep into the Rabbit hole, and started using NixOS just to write the thesis itself. It did eventually result in a fun blog post, though!

https://shen.hong.io/nixos-for-philosophy-installing-firefox...