That said, The Lamport book I used heavily in my undergrad still has a place on my bookshelf.
I am a peer-reviewer and an editor on a few academic journals. In my field, a mix of authors use [Xe](La)TeX and Word. There's a definite quality bias towards the TeX articles -- not because of the typesetting per se but rather because it's indicative of a lot of time spent carefully preparing a document to a standard. I'm sure others in similar fields have similar experiences.
I'm the proud owner of the entire 6 vol Computers and Typesetting series (of which the former title is vol A), and have worked through sizable portions of those. I also read mot of the 680 pages of Knuth's Digital Typography monograph. I also owned one LaTeX book at some point. I admire the depth of Knuth's knowledge (typographic and otherwise), the sheer diligence, his quest for quality, all of that. Those lion doodles though, the author's urge to land another witty remark, come up with another finely crafted reference, and how he's prone to hint at stuff instead of writing a proper documentation are not aspects of his work that I enjoy.