I went through a similar journey a while ago, except I haf a semi-practical result to get at.

I wanted to draw an fairly detailed energy-level diagram for a particular atom and I wanted the it done to scale -- except for certain fudges made for clarity.

The amount of repetitive calculation and not-quite-trivial logic meant it made sense to use a a programming language rather than a "simple" document format. I chose hand-written PostScript mostly for fun.

But PS actually quite a nice language for the task -- no worse than the various Python libraries which would have been my main alternative.