I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors.

But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.