The real downside to LaTeX/TeX is when there's a hard page limit and you have to keep hacking your document and recompiling it.
Also, writing in LaTeX you're more likely to make grammar, usage and spelling errors since those tools are not coupled as well if at all to your editor---no green and red squiggles telling you that you need basic English remediation. Yeah yeah, there are things that are close, like flyspell mode, but they're generally inferior in terms of the precision/accuracy of the types of suggestions they give you.
All that said, 'markup iz hard' is not a compelling reason not to use it.
A while ago I tried installing Slackware 3.0 on Virtual Box out of nostalgia, and it was everything I remembered and worse. I only managed to get XFree86 to start up in some 300x200 mode that would pan around the 'virtual' size. Getting networking working required a kernel recompilation.
Even after all that, there wasn't much it could do. I'm not sure why I insisted on running that instead of Windows 95.
To this day, I can remember how to build a 1.2.X kernel. You were also very lucky if you had a soundblaster card, because only a handful of sound drivers that were in the kernel.
A little later OSS came out. To get sound to work a lot of cases you had to shell out money for commercial sound drivers, or get a crack from #linuxwarez.
My first install was slackware 3.0 on 4mb. You had to manually partition the disk and setup swap space before you could even launch the installer.
This was a minor inconvenience compared to swapping the 40 1.44mb disks needed to install it because I couldn't get it to use my pre-atapi cdrom drive correctly. Using the cdrom drive it would work for a little bit, and then everything would start timing out. And, a network install was some science fiction as far as I and my 9600bps modem were concerned.
Then once you got it all installed you could start trying to get X11 and ppp to work...
Also, writing in LaTeX you're more likely to make grammar, usage and spelling errors since those tools are not coupled as well if at all to your editor---no green and red squiggles telling you that you need basic English remediation. Yeah yeah, there are things that are close, like flyspell mode, but they're generally inferior in terms of the precision/accuracy of the types of suggestions they give you.
All that said, 'markup iz hard' is not a compelling reason not to use it.