[omaranto]

I guess that, as most things related to using software, it boils down to familiarity. You say you managed to figure out Word's rules for when text will inherit formatting of the text to the left of it and when it won't. I believe you, I imagine I would have learned them too if I kept using Word. On the other hand when I taught Linear Programming I typeset lots of optimization problems and didn't Google anything, because I already know plenty of LaTeX. I certainly have googled stuff for LaTeX and found it is a quick and painless way of figuring out how to do something. This seems like an advantage of LaTeX, not a disadvantage as you seem to think. What do you do in Word when you want to do something you don't how to do? Doesn't googling also work there? And if not, that seems like a disadvantage of Word.

[t_mann]

Googling also works for Word, but I practically never need it there. It's just so easy to find solutions to those questions that you barely perceive them as such. I even figured out the shortcuts just by trying something that seemed to make sense (fyi: Italics is Ctrl+I, bold is Ctrl+B; changing indentation levels in a list is Alt+Shift+Arrow, getting out of the list indentation requires three times backspace, which I agree doesn't make sense, but it's easy enough to figure out within seconds of the first encounter; and yeah, you can google those if you want). In LaTeX I need to switch to a different window get to Google much more frequently, and I find that breaks my flow. I don't see how this could be framed as anyhting but a disadvantage.

Anything becomes easy if you practice it enough, but I find both the 'onboarding' as well as the 'steady-state' productivity higher in Word, because you spend next to no time looking for how stuff works and instead focus on your content. Yes, LaTeX formatting generally looks better (eg spacing, LaTeX even lets you adjust the spacing between individual characters), but looks come second to content imho.