Please, no. I've written thousands of pages in LaTeX, and it's far more usable than most tools IF you can resist trying to overcomplicate things. For example, want a diagram? If you do it in xfig/inkscape/omnigraffle, you'll have little pain. If you decide to get clever and try to programmatically do it via tikz or some other package, you've opened up a world of pain.

The level of pain experienced by LaTeX users in my experience is more often poor choices made by the users who create unnecessary complexity. Avoid that, and it's a pretty reasonable model to work in.