It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot better than word, largely because LaTeX aut…
I get your point, but you're really exaggerating the difficulty of changing margins, paragraph spacing, and similar things. It's easy with straight LaTeX, and even easier with the "geometry" package.
Yes, to address to criticisms of your comments and siblings, in my experience if you start changing fonts, then you need to change margins and paragraph spacing, and down the rabbit hole you go. The thing is, a small change is not very complicated, but the defaults are also really good. So if you just want to get below a certain page limit, then it is easy to change the margin. If you start to wanting to improve the overall look of the document, then it is usually a much better idea to play with different packages were someone else already did the hard work instead of trying to improve details by yourself.