It's a mistake to think we can't improve on something because someone smart built it. In my academic community, everyone fights with LaTeX and I can only say with confidence that one person I know has mastered it. Everyone else just hacks at their document until it's close enough.
That could also describe the process by which the majority of computer code is written when you consider everything that involves coding these days. The situation is not likely to change with new tools.
Fair point. I hack LaTeX because I like to, but it's a perishable skill and requires fairly regular use. But that's not really the way (in my opinion) you should be using it. When I designed the layout for my lecture notes, that was a couple of months of on-again off-again tweaking and building a style document and macros. Now, I have a trivial to use template that any of my colleagues could use. After a few years, it's pretty stable, but I still tweak it from time to time and note (pleasantly, given how rare this sort of thing is with code) that my decade old documents still compile just fine with the tweaked version.
When I wrote my thesis, I didn't hack LaTeX - I downloaded the style file and template and just started writing. Someone else maintains those files, and hundreds of Masters' and Doctoral candidates use them without major issues (other than those who've never used anything by Word, but who the hell wants to design for them?)
That person who mastered it? Get them to spend a few dozen hours putting together a bullet proof style. That's how you do it.
Final note: I don't think something built by someone smart can't be improved on. But I do think you need to have a pretty solid understanding of why they did it the way they did before you get to call what you're doing an improvement. And an awful lot of critiques of TeX/LaTeX seem to come from a place of ignorance (frequently the "why isn't it like Word?" ignorance that tend to end the conversation for me).
