My personal beef with LaTeX, other than the utterly atrocious syntax, is that it a.) endlessly barfs on your terminal during its normal operation and b.) does not respond to normal terminal interaction upon an error (wth is it expecting? I interactively edit and correct mistakes!?). So it's scroll blindness and flailing all the way, a kludgy, rickety mess. Not to mention its utter mess of a package management system.