[jimhefferon]

> You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

Hard to know precisely what you mean by this, but if you mean that you shouldn't be writing things like

    \documentclass{article}

    \begin{document}
    Hello world.
    \end{document}

then you are mistaken; the LaTeX book (and many other documents) describes what to do. If what you mean is that a person is somehow meant to use a front end such as LyX, then you'll get a lot of disagreement (such as from me).

[pseingatl]

What I mean is that in your example the only content is "Hello world." The rest is typesetting. The original question asked, "what tool should I use to write?" LaTex answers the question, "how can I typeset what I have written?" BTW, Lyx is a terrific program. My only complaint with it is that I haven't found a way to mimic a word processor's tab behavior consistently. The tabbing package doesn't do it for me. \qquad does, kind of, but that's six keystrokes. The problem is that in some kinds of writing text placement may have meaning and this conflicts with LaTex's underlying paradigm of automating typesetting decisions.

[jimhefferon]

LaTeX was certainly intended for a document such as I wrote so you are wrong, as documented in Lamport's book.