After all this time, nobody told something very important.
LaTeX texts are written in a text file, it can be used for Literate programming, an style proposed by Don Knuth to write very well documented programs. The idea is to explain how the program was developed in a way similar to math text. Pieces of code are presented like the formulas, in mathematical texts.
This is a great idea, after some time you can read how the program was conceived and you can modify the parts explaining why the decision was taken in the same way.
Other advantage is that you can generate LaTeX code as an output of your programs, in this way you can publish your results beautifully typeset, or use programs like gnuplot to generate graphs then generate LaTeX code for the graph and insert it in your text, that is great because the resulting file is very light compared to graphs exported to some image format, to include it with \includegraphics or worse if you are using some word processor by pasting it.
LaTeX is not really hard to learn, just take your pace, use what you need starting with simple documents. When you advance in your studies you will need to learn new features and packages. If you try to master LaTeX by learning all the packages just to become a LaTeX expert, you are wasting your time, there is a huge amount of packages, but you don't need to learn them all. Try to start with guides like "the not so short introduction to LaTeX" lshort.pdf, or "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" gentle.pdf.
If you are tired of typing long macros, learn to write your own for the pieces you use more, the guides have a section about that.
Where to find information, in ctan.org, tug.org, do not search in latex.com that domain stands for the rubber material.
There is a TeX/LaTeX Catalog, search it in ctan.org it is very helpful when you need an special feature. You can find it here http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/index.html, but you can search texcatalogue if this link becomes outdated.
To finish my comment, there is a great advantage that LaTeX and other software do not change of versions frequently, TeX/LaTeX is a very complete system for typesetting, you can add (and share) more features if you need something that does not exist.
Learning LaTeX is a good time investment, you just need to learn it once, then dedicate to do you work, not to learn the new version.
P.S.
I forgot to say that it is possible to write programs to translate LaTeX to other markup languages, (and word processors formats if documented) and vice versa. In deed there are several that give acceptable results, although as far as I know there is not yet a program that translates any LaTeX code, but for the more common texts you can find several programs to translate them to HTML, LibreOffice can export a word processor document to LaTeX, although it is not very useful because few word processor users use the tags to mark paragraphs as headers, quotations, etc. the vast majority mark the text to change the font, size, alignment, etc. and this is translated into LaTeX.
But you may need to do this when collaborating with people that use word or LibreOffice, and you have to integrate it with you LaTeX text, just ask them to use the right markings or export it as text and insert the needed macros manually, after all you have to review the whole text of your collaborator.
Once there was need to translate it to HTML to publish on the net or make portable presentations, but now the bandwidth allows to transmit PDF files fast, and packages like beamer allows one to write very nice presentations.
The advantages of TeX/LaTeX are of the size of the packages that can be written on it an the will to share them. Thanks to Knuth for his great ideas, we are still waiting the full set of his Art of Computing Programming.
