[brudgers]

My understanding and experience is that Latex has a significant learning curve and Pandoc provides a more gentle front end.

Of course Latex gives you fine control to hand tune the engine…but that doesn’t seem like what the OP is looking for.

[kreetx]

Sure, I don't mean that anyone would look at the Latex in between. I'm just saying that if tool x directly calls tool y to do the job then might as well use tool y directly.

[brudgers]

Since hammers and nails are a common tool-workpiece example…consider the nail gun.

Theoretically you can drive nails with a 22 caliber blank cartridge without making the “call” through a nail gun. But you won’t finish laying shingles as quickly and easily…

Or to put it another way, there’s a reason assemblers are almost always better than machine code and compilers are almost always better than assemblers for the ends people care about.

I mean why use Latex at all when you could write your own typesetting language? Maybe because you are not a knuth.

[kreetx]

You're confusing wrappers with alternatives. The comparison is more like if somebody published a script called html-to-pdf.sh which directly calls, e.g, chrome, would you want to use this script or use chrome directly? I would prefer the latter because (1) I would know what actually does the conversion, (2) I would know what to search for on the web should I need to tweak the output. This knowledge gives me more power as I know the actual converter. The wrapper script perhaps only helps with what the command line should be.