Hell, I just had a postdoc send me figures as part of a manuscript draft where she was using Powerpoint to make the figures instead of something more appropriate like Illustrator. Most people who publish don't care about how their documents are created, they just want them to work and get published. Word does a pretty good job for this.
Use the best tools for the job. Most people would tell you that BASIC is easier to use than C++, if you can write your program in BASIC. And if you don't want to deal with learning curve of C++ and you get get by with BASIC, then what's wrong with using a tool that works?
I'm sick of the "HN strawman." People on these threads need to read and apply basic critical reading and logical skills.
You don't need to tell ME to use the best tools for the job. I've been telling people that for fucking years. I don't why your comment annoyed me so much but it did.
In some fields LaTeX is the easier method to produce documents (good luck with anything more than a simple equation in Word), but those are relatively small niches.
But you can't honestly say that Word and LaTeX really have that big of a difference in intended jobs. It seems to me that they are both in the document production business.
One can be abused to fill the role of the other, and if you look at them both from 1000 feet and squint then both "for" the same thing, but the reality is that when you actually examine what each is designed to do and in which situations each is used, they really have little to do with each other.
LaTeX and Word are for documents - making documents. How they operate is very different. For example, Word includes it's own editor, LaTeX does not. But they are both used for producing documents.
I am not fond of LaTeX. However, for some fields there are simply no dedicated programs, while there are good LaTeX packages. For instance, for my thesis I drew a lot of attribute-value matrices (in the unification grammar/HPSG sense). There is a great packages to draw these structures, both flat and in tree form.
I had some hope that DocBook et al. could replace LaTeX for most uses. It's great in many respects: it's just XML, so easy to machine-interpret. Customising output is easy (via XSL stylesheets). There is good support for producing PDFs (via XSL-FO). And it supports SVG and MathML. There are also great WYSIWYG editors, such as Oxygen. However, that toolchain never became popular, because most people hate XML.
The book that we never got to finish[1] is written in DocBook, equations are in MathML. The Slackware book that I once wrote [2] is also completely done in DocBook.
I'm a biomedical researcher, and I use LaTeX. It's my preferred method of document preparation. I know many others who use LaTeX as well.
I want to draw a conformal mapping diagram in word and also write a 3-vector of the navier-stokes equations.
Also, I want to do a lot of tensor arithmetic with tons of superscripts and subscripts and arrows.
Tell me how any of this is accomplished in Word please. Saying Word is easier to us is like saying BASIC is easier than C++.