I don't understand why LaTeX is considered hard. I wish people would try TeX out first as well. You literally type stuff and a paragraph comes out. Enter a blank line to separate paragraphs. It can't be much easier. LaTeX just adds some macros to make it easy to make a title and section headings etc. Once you become proficient at entering equations in TeX it's incredibly fast. And you won't even need to render them to read them after a while.

> One can achieve something like 95% of the visual appearance of native LaTeX documents with a one-time investment of an hour or less work

Yes, and one can use LaTeX and achieve 100% with a similar one-time investment. I really don't understand this. To produce the document presented here LaTeX has absolutely no extra overhead compared with any other tool.

I suspect the misconception comes from the complicated looking tools like TeXnicCenter etc. If people saw me writing LaTeX in emacs (with zero buttons or other complications) they wouldn't think it was complicated. It's just text.

Still, if people insist on using Word for whatever reason I'm glad if they make the documents look nice like this one, even if the page geometry is way off (use Komascript).