Can one not value the simplicity of an apple, the juiciness of an orange and compare it to a Pomelo, wishing the latter had both?

I would say LaTeΧ can be perfectly well seen as a combination of many aspects of Word and Markdown in the sense that it offers the feature set and backwards compatibility that Words offers, while culminating a legacy, complexity and perceived indeterminism that also plagues Word (though in a different way); and on the other side being a plain text format that can be version controlled and taken apart and shared as snippets.