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The same reason a lot of file/language standards become popular. They suck less than everything else when they were created and then large amounts of material became tied up in their continued existence ( i.e. academic papers ).

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Existing papers do not really force new papers to be typeset in LaTex, since end products are just PDFs.

I don't know of any alternative solution that is as easy to use and produces a high quality document.

Some disciplines wound up having lots of handy LaTeX macros written to handle things that are common to the kinds of papers that get written, as well as there formerly being the requirement that papers be submitted as LaTeX documents. More the first reason, I think, tended to encourage LaTeX usage for a while. Once you got used to it, LaTeX really made it faster to get what you want without having to fiddle too much with the formatting.

I know I spent a lot of time with qtree, gb4e, and pstricks.

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