[jimhefferon]

> My major point of friction with LaTeX is that using unicode is not straightforward.

Possibly you are describing how it used to be before the input encoding standard for LaTeX switched to UTF-8?

[enriquto]

No. I'm talking about modern LaTeX. You can easily write é outside of math mode, but not inside. By default, you cannot write α either inside nor outside of math. By using the right packages, you can do both, but other things break.

[aragilar]

Which engine? I believe XeTeX and LuaTeX support it natively?