Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote to Kernighan a few years ago, when "D is for Digital" came out, to ask him, in effect, if troff had been made obsolete by TeX. At the time I had begun using it, and wondered if it was worth investing my time to learn. He answered that he still preferred to use groff, having tried alternatives. Since then I have used groff exclusively for writing documentation and papers. It never runs out of gas, and always p…
What platform do you write on? Linux? Mac? I'm genuinely curious. I have been looking for substitutes to Latex ever since writing my dissertation in Latex and having to debug/tweak an already horrendous Latex .sty file. I basically decided that I would either write technical documents in Tex or not at all after that. For me, Latex is great, until it isn't, and then it's Jinga-on-a-unicycle frustration.
You can always go back to the basics and use simple TeX for your documents if you think groff/troff is simpler.
However, I'd encourage you to give ConteXt http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ a try because it is the spiritual successor to TeX (one tool for all the typesetting) instead of having to depend on "third party" stuff like LaTeX, most of which very few of us (outside the original sty author) understand.