[gunnihinn]

Hi, LaTeX copyeditor and typesetter here. The bane of my existence are authors who know just enough LaTeX to be dangerous. First, almost all of their formatting work is the first thing to be thrown out. Second, authors are strongly incentivized to learn the bare minimum of LaTeX to do what they need, and to copy-paste furiously whatever stuff they find on the net. You have to remember that (La)TeX is both a markup and a programming language. Can you imagine spending your time reading code written by a copy-paste monkey? I can, and don't wish you the pleasure.

[dragandj]

Sure - for highly specialized stuff. But, let's not pretend that 99% of the published work couldn't be well served by standard LaTeX templates and a little effort of learning the basics. If that is too much, then how do they send you the formatting specifications anyway? In some custom, poorly self-invented format?

[nowprovision]

This comment could so easily be PHP about instead of LaTeX, your pain is shared.