Sorry, but I'll stick to my point. We should stop making excuses for software that was great in its time but is simply not adequate anymore by today's standards.
Almost nothing is straightforward in LaTex, and images aren't either. Placing an image exactly where you want it can become a serious issue - even more so in documents that change and get reflowed all the time.
Yes, LaTex often makes good decisions that require little tweaking. But the moment you disagree with one of its decisions you find yourself in a world of pain.
Almost nothing is straightforward in LaTex, and images aren't either.
Almost nothing is straightforward in Word, and images aren't either.
Word works very intuitively until you try to achieve fine control of layout. Then if you haven't done things the correct way, where Word's document model is not more intuitive than Latex's, getting the results you want will be painful.
It is true that the distance between Word and Latex in terms of suitability for producing high-quality output has narrowed drastically in the time from, say Word 6.0 to Word 2010. But the Tex family is not software that was great in its time. I use both Word and Tex-based technologies most working days, and I massively prefer to the Tex-based technologies in terms of quality output. It is still the case that for obtaining quality proofs from a .doc/.docx file, professionals use external software such as Adobe Indesign. Indeed, there are workflows that take Word documents and convert them to Tex-based representations for typesetting.
standard straw man - Care to name a system that isn't a straw man? Word is serious, capable software, and the de-facto standard for document preparation.
Word is not even playing when output quality is a concern.
You named one yourself (Adobe Indesign), the other that I know of would be QuarkXpress.
I don't know a piece of free software that directly competes with LaTeX, the latter has been the de-facto standard for university papers and a small group of book-writers/enthusiasts for about 20 years.
However, pitting LaTeX against Word is about as meaningful as pitting Linux against Windows. You wouldn't excuse the thorny Linux desktop experience with the security track record of windows either - it'd be an apples vs oranges comparison.
You actually can get decent output quality from Word. It is just that Word becomes inefficient when this is a concern. Indesign is not really aimed at authors, but is for people who want to turn edited copy into publishable proofs.
Open Office exists as part of a free Java-based ecosystem. I couldn't say it is used in any serious publication workflows, but the components are there. Context is aimed at serious publishers, and has strong roots in educational (i.e., not academic) publishing.
Apples vs. oranges: the point of this subthread has been that I thought your statement But the underlying toolchain and language are past their expiration date. By far. and backing this up by talking about how hard "easy" things can be that turn out to not to be trivialities anywhere. Latex is not for casual users, but it is very much not past its expiration date for authors who are serious about typesetting. I'm not making excuses for Latex, nor am I unfairly bashing the alternatives.
Sorry, but I'll stick to my point. We should stop making excuses for software that was great in its time but is simply not adequate anymore by today's standards.
Almost nothing is straightforward in LaTex, and images aren't either. Placing an image exactly where you want it can become a serious issue - even more so in documents that change and get reflowed all the time.
Yes, LaTex often makes good decisions that require little tweaking. But the moment you disagree with one of its decisions you find yourself in a world of pain.