Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your frustration. Maybe it helps to know where this problem comes from. TeX is extremely powerful and lets you create arbitrary documents. This is the first time I heard of quarto, but apparently it makes a lot of choices for you that you understandably don't really care about. Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so: \newcommand{\image}[2…
> Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so: If it's so simple, why isn't there QuarTeX that does all of that and removes the extreme verbosity barrier?
And users of LaTeX are probably not knowledgeable enough or too busy to publish their opinionated subset of LaTeX as a class. I don't know for sure. There is no central body that has an interest in removing barriers, so you might as well ask me or yourself why I or you haven't published anything.
I developed something similar to this at my company, because we write lots of LaTeX documents and need shortcuts like this not only for brevity but also so that we achieve some consistency across the entire team. It's only for internal use though and thus not public.