[blackbear_]

I'd say the problem isn't so much about readability but about ease of doing certain things. Case in point: non trivial tables, with multirows/multicols, newlines inside cells, and so on

[jimhefferon]

But aren't hard things going to be hard to do?

There are things that, if you did them in a GUI, would be multiple steps down the tree of menus. It seems natural to me that they require multiple commands.

(Not that LaTeX is perfect, for sure. Admit I only glanced at this. But after trying a bunch of things that the author asserts are simplifiers, I've not found one that is as capable. All too often they make super simple things that are already simple, and then fall back to LaTeX for the rest.)

[Ar-Curunir]

Debugging those tables is still a pain in the ass. I am certain that we there's a better way than today, where if you accidentally add or remove a newline your table breaks