Wargame: LaTeX package to prepare hex'n'counter wargames

Remember first time I tried to generate some hex map for wargames using a computer and realized that no one had printers bigger than A4, they were monochrome and so on... and how hard it was to generate one using just pencil and ruler.

What makes LaTeX so horrible to use (for me) is the need to use packages for seemingly simple things which have weird dependencies and error messages only experienced users know how to deal with. This package is just one more layer of absurdity to me. Why does everything have to be solved with overly complex packages? Graphics are a thing for a reason. Am I alone in this?

So it sounds like you're asking for a package where you get (basically) the ability to draw lines, circles, textures, etc.: the basic graphics primitives.

Here's my question to you: would you really want to build a hex map at that level? To me, that just seems an awful lack of abstraction. It's one thing if everything you do is a one-off figure, but for this you really want something that packages it together in a way that makes sense. If you don't get that from something like this package, you're going to build it yourself (best case), or just do without (much more likely) resulting in ugly, impossible to maintain code. I know, because I've been there.

Here's a challenge to you: what exists outside of the Latex community that is remotely comparable to this? (And not just this, but any of the number of other Latex packages that do similarly impressive things.) I could be wrong, but as far as I know those things generally don't exist. Maybe the closest match would be in the web/JavaScript community, but I don't think those things make it so easy to generate PDFs (especially high-quality ones). Latex, for all its faults, seems to encourage this sort of highly powerful level of abstraction.

I share your frustrating in trying to get things to integrate, but for this sort of thing I just don't see a good alternative.

TikZ is wonderful, and any graphics prepared with it just have an edge of professionalism that raster graphics don't.

I really just wish we had a WYSIWYG interface for it, à la Illustrator or Inkscape (yes, the latter can export to TikZ, but I would like a vector graphics editor specifically to work with the TikZ model).

No. Take a look at ConTeXt https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page>, another TeX superset. It integrates TeX typesetting with MetaPost graphics and Lua programming, and does a much better job than LaTeX, in my opinion. Although LaTeX has infinitely more libraries, extending ConTeXt isn't as difficult and cumbersome as creating LaTeX packages.