Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.
The comment I was replying to specifically called out Google Docs as bad, so that was what I was referring to. I agree that they appear to have mostly-similar features (though, to me as someone who doesn't use either as a Power User, GD seems to be more focused on online collaboration, and MW on local editing, the output of which is then shared)
And before someone asks, yes, I feel similarly about GitHub, and wasn't the least bit surprised when it sold itself to the self-declared enemy of open source of previous decades (now reformed, of course!).
Yes, these things are convenient, they have great UX nudging you toward what serves the interests of whoever owns them. I'm not arguing against the usability of Google Docs but against transplanting that model to a community built on entirely different principles.
> evil science publishing parasites (you know the names)
Not being part of the scientific community, I don't - but I trust you that they exist!
Then try to modify it as little as possible while improving things.
And add better support for concepts like page numbers, page headers, page footers, which while theoretically supported by HTML and CSS, aren't well supported in practice.
Given that many people use Python now for scientific purposes, and it's a straightforward language, to add extensibility to this Latex replacement, maybe just use Jinja templates and Python packages.
What I'm describing is not do-able by one person, and the result of refusing to coordinate a team around the project (and instead having a hodge-podge of tools built by various people) is the current LaTeX ecosystem mess.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If you accept that premise, the decision has to be: which system would serve the most people the best? I'm inclined to think that a team with a budget of $20M would probably get the closest.
Oh, there are a couple of such candidates, actually, built with very different philosophies: there's XeTeX, intended to graft Unicode and OpenType support onto TeX with as little disruption as possible, such that it "just works" with minimal effort; and there's LuaTeX, which "deconstructs" TeX to give you an infinitely-flexible typesetting toolkit that can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to wield it.
Of course it's a work of love, but it's a tool from the 70s
Clinging to the past might be interesting but in the end it's that, a tool
TeX's downfall is the macro system. It makes it too easy for people to pile on poorly written abstractions that make working with any given document a nightmare because it has its own DSL. But because those packages and macros grew organically by researchers solving problems for themselves they are too practically useful to just drop them. So there are lots of annoying unintuitive quirks that you end up just having to put up with.