Well, is more an opportunity to move forward. You just have to consider LaTeX as another output format, not really for human consumption, similar to PDF and HTML. Something you do not want to edit by hand. Many people are anyway moving in this direction using Markdown+pandoc and similar solutions. TeXmacs is another possibility in this direction which allows you to concentrate on the contents, including structure, and not on the programming of the content.
About a decade ago I was already doing technical documentation like that by using DITA and Oxygen XML Author (there are other alternatives).
However most of these Word like tools tend to be commercial (the best ones), so they are hardly seen in FOSS contexts.
There is always the possibility to switch to source; there is a menu item in the editor (Document->Source->Edit source tree), and when examining source the editor becomes a structure editor (this enforces syntax as far as I understand).