> TeX is essentially a programming
language for typesetting. I sigh when I
think of learning a new language for such
a narrow purpose.

Yup, and "sigh" is a mild version.

I don't remember saying that TeX was
"easy".

Actually, for just text, TeX can be quite
easy, as easy as, say, HTML, old WordStar, Word, the old Runoff programs, etc. That is,
just need to know a few tags.

The difficult parts are doing more, lots more,
especially typesetting some mathematics
with some tricky notation. It's
fair to say that, just due to mathematics
and its notation, fundamentally there is
no "royal road" to typesetting all of
mathematics -- much of it, yes, all of it,
no.

I confess I spent a lot of time in Knuth's
book. At one point I wrote a verbatim
macro and like it better than what Knuth
has -- verbatim is tricky because need to
cancel temporarily a lot of what is in
TeX. I wrote the macro so that I could
document with the source code TeX macros
in TeX documents. At the time, that
seemed important -- I no longer believe it
is.

Also I wanted to use TeX as the formatting language for my old daisy wheel printer, say, instead of old PC
WordStar or some such. At the time, that
seemed important. Nope, it wasn't.

But for business cards? Yup, TeX has been
nice. Can get some sheets to run through a black and white laser printer. The TeX is cute, say, have the TeX for one business card and, then, use more TeX tricks to position the results for one card on all the cards on one sheet. Then bend
the sheets and get a stack of cards -- they look good enough (somehow the edges
are clean enough).

But I've got the macro; writing it is
a good TeX exercise.

Maybe have to look at TeX in about the
right way. Or, from a movie, "I'll love it
when it works." with the response "It will work when you love it." Or, love it for what it is good for; don't hate it for what it's not good for. TeX is not good for
everything.

What is TeX good for? Sure, Knuth's books in his series The Art of Computer Programming (TACP) and, okay, also papers in, say, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) journals.

Or, TeX is to do on a computer what
typesetters used to do by hand for math text, many physics and engineering texts,
TACP, and the AMS. So, right, TeX is not
the ultimate way to put any and all marks in color, etc. on paper or a screen now and in the future. For the future, really, TeX was to computerize the old work of
math typesetting, not create a new future in formatting or putting wildly conceived marketing materials on billboards, handbills, TV, or computer screens. E.g., I don't see an easy way in TeX to wrap multicolored, stretched text around a sphere and have it rotating with sparks flying off -- maybe Knuth could use TeX for that! I see no way to do ray tracing graphics in TeX. TeX doesn't replace everything from Adobe or HTML5 or be the sole tool of all graphic artists, movie makers, etc.

But if you want to be able to type math,
and I do, then TeX is just fantastic -- beautiful results and, for such good results, by far the easiest approach.

If look at Knuth's book and insist on just
an introductory tutorial for an hour or so
and just f'get about the rest, then you
should do okay at first. As you want
more, say, ordered lists, unordered lists,
simple lists (I have some simple macros for each of those three, with the logic for some nesting), good control over page
breaks, exact control on space
after periods, positioning of figures, using TeX
to put math annotation on a figure
(basically have TeX print on top of the
figure -- actually easy enough once see how it works), some
fancy foils format, essentially automatic tables of contents,
cross references, a nice way to do
references (I have a good enough way but
don't use BibTeX), getting good with font
magnification, handling hyphenation in
detail yourself, tricky tables (they are
not so easy in HTML, either -- about the
only easy way to do tables is with just
flat ASCII and assuming a monospaced
font!), then look some things up in The
TexBook.

I believe you will find that the simple
stuff can still be simple. And for the
math, say, at the level of freshman
calculus, that's actually quite natural
and easy also.

IMHO, LaTeX is more difficult. Maybe
LaTeX makes it easier to have some book
format with title page, frontispiece,
preface, table of contents, fronts matter,
body, parts, chapters, sections,
subsections, back matter, tricky running headers and footers, references,
colophon, etc., but, gee, Knuth wrote his
book in TeX and not everyone is trying to
write the Encyclopedia Britannica.

If something seems really challenging in TeX, then maybe don't really need to do that. Or get some help from the
KISS princple -- Keep it Simple Sam.

E.g., for KISS, consider HN: How can post pictures? Can't do that. How can include TeX math? Nope, not there. How about bold face? Can't do that either. How about ordered lists nicely indented? Not there. Still HN
is darned useful.