[ddmitriev]

Eons (>15 years) ago, I sold software that relied on having a working TeX installation, and to make it easier on my users, my installer provided a very very trimmed down version of MiKTeX as an optional download. The beautiful thing about MiKTeX is that its autoinstall feature meant that one could delete 90% of the packages, and the worst that would happen is that referencing something I deemed unessential would prompt a just-in-time download.

I recall I managed to cut MiKTeX down to about 12MB. Never heard a single complaint about it.

[m_mueller]

Why hasn’t something like this become the standard way to use LaTeX? Boggles my mind.

[bzxcvbn]

Latex is stuck in the past. Academic publishers even more so. It's 2022, and I can't use slightly non-standard letters (e.g. non-Latin characters) in my papers without jumping through hoops. It's anyone's guess as to which ones will work and which won't. The language was designed in the 80's and it shows, many commonly used packages are severely outdated and nobody cares.

[m_mueller]

I guess noone can receive fake brownie points (paper impact factor) by fixing that stuff.