In my experience the abstract statement "The downside is that it is a
very time intensive and complicated method of writing papers. " is just incorrect.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you are past that it is much less time intensive that writing papers in a word processor. This effect is magnified with longer documents.
That may be somewhat domain specific. And to be open about my biases, I also think that Word's "track changes" is a pretty poor collaboration tool.
I might be going to downvote hell for this, but as a computer scientist writing papers for a living, every hour spent writing latex belies your comment.
By the way, Context is a much saner alternative, although it still shares many of Latex' core flaws.
Unfortunately, that doesn't matter because most conference mandate use of their Latex or (ugly) Word template, and using Word is cause for ostracization.
You are also correct to say that version control is a big advantage of Latex. I wonder why Microsoft hasn't come up with a better competing solution.
How many papers have you written? Have you written a master's or PhD thesis? How exactly are you spending your hours writing LaTeX? It sounds like you are doing it wrong.
It took me a while to figure out what you meant. I've never looked at people's profiles on here before. I couldn't imagine writing my thesis in anything but LaTeX. Or rather, anything that didn't support both high-quality typesetting and programming. I had little programs written in my .tex files which would generate some of the tables and figures. TikZ is wonderful. I aimed for nothing less than TAoCP level of quality.
The output of Tex is superior to anything else. I doesn't change the fact that the user experience is awful.
But if you want Tex quality with less head-bashing, Context is much better than Latex. It's what I use for my thesis, but not for my papers -- templates are all Latex, and I didn't know about it at the time.
Also I disagree with your basic point: hours of my time are worth much more than some fancy ligatures and fluff that makes the text look very marginally better.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you are past that it is much less time intensive that writing papers in a word processor. This effect is magnified with longer documents.
That may be somewhat domain specific. And to be open about my biases, I also think that Word's "track changes" is a pretty poor collaboration tool.