to summarize:

you've written a handful of latex documents, so you're now an expert on what latex is used for and what people want out of it. would it help to point out that given latex is more difficult to use than word, I'd bet most latex users have tried and discarded word in favor of latex? Would that affect your judgements about the relative use cases?

   There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex 
   has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That 
   just isn't so.

Since, well, nothing else offers similar typesetting plus mathematical notation / flexibility, your proof is... what exactly?

If you built a better system, you'd find customers for it.

>I'm by no means a LaTex expert. I've written a few papers and a bunch of reports, nothing published, just undergraduate stuff

I had a long talk about something like this with a close friend last night. He has a favorite technology stack that is regularly trash talked on sites like this. From what he's seen its usually from people who have only a passing knowledge of it. Either they worked a job and only had to mess with it for a few months or they worked with it for a long time but never went past just the surface. Almost all the complaints he's seen about it are either extremely outdated, fixable with a little custom code or configuration changes. I think you should spend a little more time with it before you say that developers should feel "ashamed" for using it. Your post falls squarely into the category he was talking about.

I wouldn't trash talk this if it was simply an unpopular way of working. I'm trash talking it because it's the most popular way of working. I don't know anyone that does not write his/her papers in LaTex.

I have a lot of respect for having your own toolchain that's optimized and comfortable for you.

I am sorry I come across wrong, I am not saying that developers should feel ashamed for using it. I am saying developers should feel ashamed that other people are using it.

I'm not saying using LaTex is dumb, I've stated multiple times in this thread that I use it myself. I'm just saying we could do better.

I disagree that it's the most popular way of working. Perhaps that is true just in mathematics, physics, and maybe even computer science but unlikely to be true in many other fields. Let's be realistic and realize that the majority of people do not use LaTeX. The ones who do use it, use it because they are putting in a lot of mathematical formulae which are easier to do in LaTeX than Word (although Microsoft is making progress with the equation editor) and the formulae look way nicer in LaTeX. Word renders the formulae into an equation that generally looks bad and scales worse.

The things that I use LaTeX for are usually my own writing that I don't have to collaborate with other people for. If I have to work with other people I use Word. The things that I like about latex are that I can have it automatically generate my figures because I can script it, which I can't do with Word.

I agree that LaTeX can be difficult to write but you have to realize that word has it's shortcomings too (put an image in and send the document to somebody else, chances are the layout will get messed up). Tools like pandoc are trying to alleviate both problems so people can work in whatever environment they prefer, which seems like a good solution to me. I could write part of my document in markdown, convert to LaTeX and write my formulae and then convert to Word so my coworkers can edit it easier.

> I'm trash talking it because it's the most popular way of working. I don't know anyone that does not write his/her papers in LaTex.

And you never stopped to investigate why, in spite of the far greater ease of entry that alternatives have?

I have a hard time believing this, to be honest. I know far, far more people who use Microsoft Word, than I do people who use (or even heard of) LaTeX.

It depends on the field. The field I am working in (computational linguistics), virtually everyone uses LaTeX. And with good reason, there are great packages for typesetting stuff that is specific to our field. So, yes, at work I know far more people who use LaTeX than Word.

Agreed. LaTeX is a very field specific tool. I don't know anyone that has ever used it (other than me, and I'm forced to use Word because that's what all my collaborators use).

I don't actually disagree with you on most points, but just out of curiosity why do you have the impression that Latex is slow? I used it to write my thesis (> 200 pages, full of images) and was re-rendering all the time, it only took a couple of seconds on my slow netbook.. When I'm working on a shorter paper, I barely notice the time between hitting "render" and seeing the result. (I realize I could even set it up to automatically render while I'm writing but prefer to concentrate purely on the text editor as much as possible and curb my urge to re-render constantly)

I've formatted three books self-published by my wife. The first in Pages (better than Word for nearly everything except document interchange), and the latter two in LaTeX.

I'll take LaTeX. It's more reliably reproducible. Once I got the basic format created (for her second book)—which took about as much time as it took to format the first book in Pages—the third book took about a tenth the time. My tooling was in place.

It's not for everyone, and you really have to either dig deep or find a macro set that does what you want (or both—I'm using a macro set on top of scrbook). There is room for something better, but that something better is not Word (or Pages).

(I'd almost say that what LeanPub does is good enough, but their LaTeX typography sucked when I tried it almost two years ago.)

"I bet that if you really dive into it you could get very close to the power of latex."

I find that very unlikely.