I have found spamming Google for LaTeX solutions to be really unsatisfactory and recently decided that I'd rather just learn my tools properly. This very very quickly led me away from LaTeX and over to plain TeX.

I have read through about 2/3 of the TeXbook so far and currently am writing my thesis in it. So far it's been really enjoyable! That's not something I could say about my past struggles with LaTeX.

Maybe once I have TeX down really pat, I'll peek back over into LaTeX, but for now I really don't see a need.

Getting a handle on the typographic primitives that TeX offers makes a huge difference. I've actually found it surprisingly easy to handcraft whatever macros I need. Though I do also use a the amstex macros.

Admittedly, it's easy to end up with a horrid mess of macros if you're not careful, but a bit of forethought and experience with frontend design patterns goes a long way.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with CJK languages nicely.

I've played a bit with plain TeX last year[1] because I wanted to find an alternative to do PDF slides using a simple text-based formatting.

Deckset is cool but I can't customize much of the layout, and I don't love HTML-based solutions. I don't love Beamer either because you have to write a lot of ceremony for a single slide, and most styles feel very "old" (lots of side/top bars).

Here's an example of what you can do using the `lecturer` package:

https://twitter.com/evacchi/status/738018829905887232

the only problem with plain TeX is that there is no good listings package

[1] https://github.com/evacchi/lecturer-playground/

I use Plain TeX for short and simple documents (which is pretty much most of my needs), it is often simpler than coercing LaTeX to do the layout I need.