> So can HTML. Would you compare Word to HTML?

I don't mean to be difficult, but lots of laypeople actually compare HTML and Word for a common purpose, usually for making simple websites. Yes, people actually do generate their front-end page formatting using Word's HTML export. Again in that context, it's technically comparable (or worth comparing, rather). And they each have their flaws. I have used HTML/CSS for lots of documentation, and experimented with it for styling my resume even though those can be classically considered Word's domain. So I actually think comparing HTML and Word is really not that strange for a non-zero number of contexts. Typesetting via "formatting" is a pretty big part of the Word experience, and is a totally worthwhile context in which to compare it to LaTeX.

> Customizing LaTeX can be hard, but using it in a straightforward way is no more difficult than HTML.

I used LaTeX for every document I created in undergrad, but mostly because I wound up spending hours the first week of every course tuning a document to match the lab report/homework format, and there was a legacy of standards passed down from upperclassmen (ie plenty of nice handholding). After I left college, I've pretty much never wanted to open a LaTeX editor (or Word really, for that matter, because I prefer Google Docs).

Typing into LaTeX really is very straightforward, and is far superior for equations and the such, yes. But to start from a blank page, it's a nightmare without lots of handholding (or experience) to make your document legible. To some extent, so is HTML/CSS, for lots of things. A lot less so with Word. This is a bit of a contrived example, but I think of this as similar to running a "Hello World" alert window in python+tkinter vs javascript+Chrome on a Windows computer. It's amazing how difficult the initial setup and configuration in the python route is (you should try it on Windows if you haven't) compared to the "write code, refresh browser" in the js route. Even though the code is possibly less friendly in js, it is actually easier to get up and running with far less handholding. There's just so many other things slowing down and making the python+windows experience making it frustrating for a beginner. That's how I feel about TeX vs Word.

I would bet money most middle schoolers, if given a blank LaTeX editor page and a blank page in Word/GDocs to write just a bunch of math formula (some fractions, arithmetic symbols and some exponents maybe?) would give you something better and sooner with the latter.

> In my experience it's a lot faster than that.

This unfortunately wasn't true for me, or for a lot of other people. Maybe large amounts of images, or the wrong image formats, or numerous other causes can make exports slow. I don't know the details of why, but it was there, and it sucked. Maybe a side-by-side editor+constant re-render in a custom output format (that's optimized for TeX rendering way faster than making a pdf), would be pretty cool, for instance. I don't need to export to pdf after every tiny edit after all.

> It more commonly takes a minute, not an hour.

I'll completely admit I got a little overdramatic by that point =]. Sure it's more commonly a minute, but it's still full of much more "Badness 10K" than I ever had Word throw an Error dialog at me. And in my (weak) defense, I have wound up spending an hour fixing a LaTeX bug from a missed closing brace, and I couldn't create the document. and it would have helped if I could have noticed it the moment it happened (as opposed to after my next recompile which took 30 seconds). I feel constant debugging shouldn't really have a place in document-writing. Perhaps better error tolerance (a la HTML) and/or debugging would be nice.

To sum up: I'm not trying to put down LaTeX. But it has lackings, which can be addressed. I also wouldn't suggest to make LaTeX function like other WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editor, but to attempt to address the root problem, ie, the feedback-loops times. Lyx tried to do that, but WYSIWYM wasn't the right answer (for all the people who still use regular LaTeX editors instead).

Well, I actually don't even write documents very much anymore so maybe I'm pretty disconnected from the whole ecosystem for a while, but from what I gather the tools haven't really evolved much at all in the last 4 years.