I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

The nice thing about a goal, is that one goal begets other sub-goals.

Or rather, a goal begets a strategy, and a strategy begets sub-goals. Beautifully at some point these sub-goals start being optimized for. A few steps of this is how I believe humans went from the sub goal "Survive, eat, reproduce" to "Make art, understand life, explore the world".

The cool thing is that I think this extends beyond humans to tools. Because at some point humans had a sub-goal of "hit thing hard" they made a hammer. And this hammer has a goal (or a purpose) which is "hit things hard". This purpose can be traced back, through human sub-goals, to the final goal of evolution: "reproduce".

Note that I am not saying that the point of a hammer is to produce more hammer. But the point of a hammer is (very indirectly) to allow a human to reproduce.

Interestingly there is a weird game of telephone that can happen, where the sub-goals are imperfect for achieving the final goal. I would argue that this is (part of) why humans can be truly selfless. Take a soldier going to a battle he considers unwinnable but going out of a sense of duty / fear of ridicule. This will not help him reproduce, since the battle is unwinnable it will not help his progeny reproduce either. From the 'ultimate' goal, this is an irrational step. But there are sub-goals at play. Things like "be honorable", "do your duty".

This idea that a sub-goal can subvert the 'ultimate' goal is very beautiful to me. It means that evolution is not some tyranny that sets our purpose in life. Instead evolution brought 'purpose' into the world. And then some stochastic process put you and me on into the universe with some, vaguely related, sense of purpose. But we have our own purpose. Sure our purpose was 'created by' the ultimate purpose of evolution. But our purpose is not subordinate to the ultimate purpose of evolution. A human life can have so much more value that just "continue the genetic line and have children". I find that freeing.

For several years (a decade maybe?) I authored my resume in LaTeX. Then a few years ago I wanted to restructure it radically, and make an interactive version that showed off some simple subset of my full-stack skillset (from design to implementation). This goal led me to authoring it in HTML with CSS. I never actually got around to implementing my full vision because I had an unexpected opportunity land in my lap before I'd officially started looking. I had the design and static mockup completed, so I just exported that to PDF and used it. In hindsight, I spent a lot less time getting the look I wanted in HTML than I did in LaTeX.

I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation, but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other authoring tasks too.

Basic LaTeX is easy; ramping up has a significant learning curve, but once that mount has been scaled, things level off quickly. Doing tables in straight LaTeX is miserable — CTAN, however, is filled with fantastic packages that make them easy. XeLaTeX makes inserting images pretty easy without packages. I will say that what may cause difficulty with images for people new to LaTeX are floats — tables, images, and the like may move page to page depending on how the document flows; if you're used to anchoring an image on a particular page in a WP, that may put one's mind a bit out of joint until it makes sense.

I agree that LaTeX has not the best syntax, but that is a better alternative?

I mostly write in Word and I can tell you that it is not that much better than LaTeX. Sure, the editor is WYSIWYG so you can see right away the title, abstract, text, etc.

The problems I have with Word are mostly solved in LaTeX. For example, references are automatically managed in LaTeX. In Word, that's mostly a manual process (I know there are integrations with Zotero/Mendeley/whatever, but those are a little wonky on a long paper---I have never used the built-in citation manager). I sometimes feel bad for the editors that have to check all my reference lists. They usually find 1-2 papers that are either missing or included and no longer cited.

Tables are also a problem in Word, especially if your collaborators use an older version that breaks the formatting (Moving between Google Docs -> Word -> Google Docs also breaks a lot of things). I can't tell you how many times I had to reformat tables that a collaborator broke. Making complex tables is also wack sometimes, like adding a simple sub-rule between cells requires some column hacks in Word.

Table/figure numbering is also another thing that I loathe in Word. Manually renumbering is a pain and the automatic numbering always breaks for me in a way or another (maybe still thanks to my collaborators).

All those things work pretty well in LaTeX with some backslash commands.

What Word really shines is track changes and commenting. I don't know if there is a LaTeX editor where you can track changes and comments like in Word (I know that Overleaf has something that kind of works).

Powerpoint vs. Beamer is a whole different ball of wax. Both have pros and cons. But with presentations with a lot of equations, beamer is definitely better but, as you point out, it doesn't play well when you want to put an equation in a specific spot in the slide. In powerpoint, you can just click and drag and you are done.

The process of evolution is more than just the elimination of unfit specimens. That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger, and the only kind of evolution that can occur in the tiger is for it to become a better (faster, stronger) tiger. But in fact there was a time when carnivores didn't even exist, and then some random genetic flux produced an animal that was inclined to start eating other animals and a new ecological niche was discovered. Evolution is therefore a creative process of adaptation and specialization under constantly changing circumstances.