It seems much more complicated, and one does indeed need to learn how to use it a bit (when I started using it, I needed about two weeks to figure out the nooks and crannies, and to grips with how one makes a good document with it), but it allows for much more control in typesetting a document. However, the main reason I use it is because it makes citing and referencing things far easier than it ever could be in Word (or a similar program), and it additionally has a lot of good functionality with images and graphs. For that reason it is ideal for any type of academic or scientific work (which is my job), and that's the core of why I use it.
However, that being said, it is super nice for other things as well, and since it's all open-source stuff, there are also awesome templates that are easy to find laying all of the internet. Like, I write my AAR and CW stuff in LaTeX, using a paperback book template I found online, and the results are really nice. Perfect spacing, perfect options available, so that when I print a .pdf it really looks just like a book. To me, that is nice, and also helps me gauge if a chapter is getting too long (I have a better feel for paperback page lengths than for word counts or page counts from a Word file).
But I guess it really is a personal choice, and depends a lot on what your needs are. If you do a lot of writing where citations or data are expected, LaTeX is a good choice. If you just write short or simple things, where there aren't rigid expectations about formatting or that stuff, Word can be just as good. I think at the end of the day what I like most about it is that you put the commands for the typesetting in yourself, so nothing ever happens where you're like "What the hell?! Why did that just indent itself?" I used to find that happening a lot in Word, that formatting would just be done automatically, but done in a way I didn't want, and I could never understand how to undo or modify it. In LaTeX if I want an indent I just type \indent before the text begins. If I want a bigger indent for the document I can just at the outset type, e.g. \setlength\parindent{1in}. Obviously that looks cryptic, but once you have a basic handle of the typesetting coding, it is all really simple and straightforward.
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