In a similar vein, I use pandoc to convert markdown pages to man pages, and write new/add notes to manpages. I think it's definitely easier than actually writing groff files.
I find it easier to write man pages directly. Admittedly, I write mdoc (not the ancient "man" macros), which has been around only since the 80s. It's easier for me to remember the semantics ("Is this a flag/command/function?") than the correct traditional markup ("Should this be bold/italic/nothing?").