[maximumoverload]

I can't agree.

I have written quite a lor of work in LaTeX and I am still perplexed by floating images and I can never tell where floats (images, tables) will be or should be, because it always jumps randomly from page to page.

My roommate at college had a thesis with lots of images and tables and he basically gave up on LaTeX because of that.

Also, installing fonts to MS Word is trivial. Installing fonts to LaTeX ... well... not so. You need to use XeLaTeX. Which breaks some other things. I tried to use bibtex with xelatex, and started to do some weird issues, until I found out that the texlive packages in debian/ubuntu repos are outdated, so I had to uninstall them and install it again from the website, and then something else broke.

Meanwhile MS Word just works as it is. And you don't need to learn the weird table syntax. And the weird floating logic. And the difference between TeX, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, BibTex, Texlive.

[apricot]

Regarding your comment about floats in LaTeX, of course you don't tell LaTeX where they go. They float. That's why they are called floats. If you don't want them to float, don't use the float environment. ( Or use the float package and the [H] option, as explained on https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-pl... ).

[Aardwolf]

Agreed. LaTeX is a mess. Its basic idea is fantastic. But its implementation is a brittle, entangled, inconsistent, old mess. Could use a fresh backwards-INcompatible reboot.