> It's a shame that TeX the great typesetting system comes with TeX the ungodly complex language

You hit the nail on the head. Brilliant design of the typesetting system, not an ergonomic language.

I think over the next few years Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will become the language all academics use to publish papers.(Or another markdown like alternative, but ours will be _very_, _very_ good)

You are always in an ergonomic, simple, fun, forgiving high level language (Scroll), but then you can dip down into TeX whenever you want for its beautiful 2D math rendering (thanks to KaTeX library).

We don't have great automatic whole document PDF generation yet (you still have to manually save as PDF from your web browser), but we will get there.

If anyone really wants this please shoot me an email--fun to get more passionate beta users that can help us steer priorities and build something free and great for paper writers all across the globe.