I have a difficult time with this comment. everyone I know who uses Latex including myself is painfully aware of its shortcomings and fairly steep learning curve.
maybe the graphical environments eliminate some of the pain around embedding images, or using wrapped figures.
but there is no way they manage to get around the fundamental lack of composibility. that sinking feeling you get when you just add one more thing or try to put an X inside of Y and the whole thing falls over in a pile.
As someone who's written multilingual books with custom typesetting needs in it, the learning curve can definitely be steep, but as someone who's also written regular old papers in it, the learning curve is "use our template", and that's kind of it. The only real learning curve is how to write maths, as long as you don't fall in the trap of trying to make LaTeX do graphics. For the love of all that is sane, use the tools best suited for that job instead. For everything else tex.stackexchange.com already has at least three posts covering any "how do I..." you might ever have.
And as someone who's even written packages: ...you're going to end up needing low level TeX, and TeX is insane, don't try to write packages. It's a world of hurt. (But then most people will never need to write their own packages)
Can you talk more about what you mean with the lack of composibility? Or of course link to some page(s) that makes that point?
maybe the graphical environments eliminate some of the pain around embedding images, or using wrapped figures.
but there is no way they manage to get around the fundamental lack of composibility. that sinking feeling you get when you just add one more thing or try to put an X inside of Y and the whole thing falls over in a pile.