[dash2]

It's absolutely true that you may need to customize things. And then you are stuck with the big quarto disadvantage: debugging a toolchain that typically looks like

    quarto -> knitr -> markdown -> pandoc -> [tex -> pdf | html]

and not knowing exactly where the error came from.

At the same time, the markdown defaults produce a nice, readable paper. The TeX defaults get you something that reminds you of Rubik's Cube and Duran Duran.

[smaudet]

Is Lyx still around? I remember it had good defaults. Haven't used in ages and it had some installer issues but I got fairly comfortable writing latex papers without learning a ton of latex...

Ofc that was a major downside, something other markdown editors figured out - if you give people buttons that make it easy and you make it easy to learn, they will learn what they need.