Over the years I've written nearly 200 papers with about 70 co-authors, probably 75% of them done in latex (most of the rest in some nroff/troff variant). The process of latex authoring usually involves iteration, with different authors contributing different sections, then a certain amount of rewriting of each other's content. Papers typically have a page limit - often 12 pages. But you ignore all that while coming up with the first few drafts. A couple of days out from the submission deadline, someone (often me) starts to panic that the paper is 16 pages and needs to be 12. That's when you start going through and copy-editing, trimming non-essential content and rephrasing for conciseness. Only during the last 48 hours do you start to worry about tuning the layout, because you know from experience that it will likely all change in the last day. In the last day you're doing fine tuning, panicking that the paper is still 13 paqes and needs to be 12. Now you do a layout tuning pass, and it's now that authors tend to get into all the nasty tricks like negative vspace, tuning caption distances, and so forth. Even then, your co-authors are probably still modifying content without paying too much about the effects on layout. Finally, two hours before the deadline, you've got it down to 12 pages. Now you have to stop changing text without regards to layout.
Anyway, my point is that in the weeks/months of writing a paper, the messy mixup of content and presentation really only becomes relevant in the last two hours before the submission deadline. Up until that point, everyone is mostly using the same subset of latex, not worrying too much about the presentation part, because the coarse-grain paper layout is usually handled by the style sheet you get from the conference.