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Latex is worth knowing, its most commonly used for academic papers, but it opens up a whole world of scripting automated documents. But, to make it really interesting, throw in
tikzand/orpgfplotsfor some interesting power tools. Tikz does A LOT, and is really powerful. But can definitely be overwhelming.If all you want is to make documents and you don't have the constraints of academic publishing, I would rather recommend Typst. It's way more modern and less painful.
And all this time, I thought Latex was just for condoms!
LaTeX is useful but the layers of abstraction makes it difficult to troubleshoot. I recommend the TeXbook and typesetting something with plain luatex, it's actually a joy to use. Maybe borrow some macros from OpTeX if needed, but those are philosophically aligned with Knuths TeX.
That is very true. If you just want to learn it, starting even at something like basic tex may make more sense. The latex ecosystem is where it starts getting interesting though, since there's been so much created and written for it. BUT that does mean you're stuck in a weird abstraction area. For when I'm just making documents (and not stuck to a specific journal format), I'm really enjoying org-mode and then piping its output to a tex PDF. I think markdown would work too, but org-mode inherits all the emacs modes, so you can get some pretty complicated in-document scripting done.
Plain TeX is simultaneously straightforward and impossibly complex. Want to change the left margin, just set hoffset to something, but if you want double sided output where the left margin changes depending on verso or recto page, then you need to redefine the output routine. Which admittedly is quite simple in TeX compared to the monster output routine in LaTeX, but still. To me, TeX is to LaTeX what C is to python.