Nonsense. When you program, does your code look like meaningless.jibber(jabber)? I certainly hope not, and your TeX shouldn't look meaningless, either. TeX is a programming language, and you need to learn to use it effectively. If you are doing non-trivial formatting, then abstract out your directives and macros. Give them meaningful names.
That said, I actually agree with your points about LaTeX, and I gave up using it a long time ago. Plain TeX works exceptionally well, though. I even wrote a small and straightforward macro package for typesetting screenplays. It has a \direction macro, for typesetting script directions; a \speaker macro, for typesetting text spoken by a speaker; and a \scene macro for switching scenes. Aside from these directives, the entire script source is readable plain text.
If I were planning to first-draft a long document and didn't want to be interrupted with nonsense, I would write it in markdown and render it to whatever output format using pandoc.