Nothing to be sorry about, it was very insightful, thank you!
An extra question because you seem knowledgeable about the topic: do you know if/where tex is still used by itself? (without latex)
An extra question because you seem knowledgeable about the topic: do you know if/where tex is still used by itself? (without latex)
My impression is that generally plain TeX is used by people who don't like all the LaTeX macro complexity and like to keep things simple (not easy), like to understand better what's going on, build their own tools, etc. In return they give up the ability of using the abundant number of LaTeX packages and standard formatting options, its decades-of-experience code, etc. If you want concrete numbers for a sense of things: on the https://tex.stackexchange.com website, there are currently 179,492 questions (https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion) and of those 590 have been tagged plain-tex (https://tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aquestion+%5Bplai...). Of course these numbers shouldn't be taken too seriously as there are various selection biases in what kinds of people would use plain TeX versus how many of them would ask questions on a site like that, etc.
Thanks again for the nice answer, people sharing like you did make HN very enjoyable