For 10+ years I've been a big fan of D. Knuth's TeX with Knuth's original macros Plain. I have about 70 TeX macros of my own. That setup is for all my higher quality word processing from ordinary letters to mathematics, and I regard it as fine. For that word processing, that setup is fine, a done deal.
I looked at LaTeX, got the basic books, etc. and concluded that (A) Knuth's documentation in The TeXBook is relatively short, well written, and essentially totally free of bugs, and it is easy to write more macros and (B) the LaTeX documentation is much longer, less well written, for the internal logic much harder to understand, maybe with bugs if only from the length and complexity and being so big and complicated, and much more difficult for me to write more macros. So, I've just stayed with TeX and never used LaTeX except once when I downloaded a paper in LaTeX and wanted to format and read it.
Lesson: TeX itself, the design, documentation, functionality, and code are really quite good, and for some people LaTeX may be less good. Don't rush to give up on TeX.
As someone who prefers TeX- i'd say the comparison goes this way(very roughly)-
TeX:
* Assembly language or C of typesetting. Gives you fine control
* useful when you have various differrnt formats and don't want to learn a new latex template for everything.
LaTex:
* Java of typesetting
* Amazing set of libraries and very useful if you work on relatively few well defined formats.
I looked at LaTeX, got the basic books, etc. and concluded that (A) Knuth's documentation in The TeXBook is relatively short, well written, and essentially totally free of bugs, and it is easy to write more macros and (B) the LaTeX documentation is much longer, less well written, for the internal logic much harder to understand, maybe with bugs if only from the length and complexity and being so big and complicated, and much more difficult for me to write more macros. So, I've just stayed with TeX and never used LaTeX except once when I downloaded a paper in LaTeX and wanted to format and read it.
Lesson: TeX itself, the design, documentation, functionality, and code are really quite good, and for some people LaTeX may be less good. Don't rush to give up on TeX.