I am very confused by the implication that TeX or LaTeX make it easy to create a document that looks exactly the way you want. Unless you want it to look like a paper presented to a publication that has a mandatory style, and a package is available with that style, it's just not true.

And that is almost the whole point. Most people are idiots about how to present written material, so TeX and friends make those decisions for us. It's especially frustrating when you have to dink with floats, because now you're second-guessing TeX, and it exacts a high price.

I've used TeX for over 25 years and I'm comfortable saying that I could produce documents of a similar quality, with better support for collaboration, with Word.

I still use TeX for many projects but the Word style capability is great.

Markdown still sucks, though. :)