Even for non-technical documents, I would still choose Latex for its advantages in areas like references and index, amenability to line-oriented version control, and the quality of the typesetting. I agree that non-technical users might make a different choice and that Latex error messages are dreadful.
I use LaTeX exclusively (with Emacs as editor) for non-technical documents (I study languages), and for me, the most relevant advantages are tightly integrated bibliography and citation management, index and shorthand capabilities and the chance of "line-oriented version control", i.e. LaTeX in git.
And the thing for introducing beginners, help them set up a preamble with the packages they will need. My experience with LaTeX has been that no matter how long you have been using it, there will always be something you will have to alter or look up. But a basic setup is not hard to deduct and by picking the packages relevant to you, you keep your files lean and get to understand what each part does. If you then have other problems you can dive into weird code snippets that only make sense since someone published them saying "Ermh...look...it's complicated...but...works, so copy & paste & be happy".
Once you've set up a basic preamble, people can actually concentrate on the content, and if they have problems, let them write their content first, the beauty of LaTeX is that all formatting woes can be addressed after the content is done.
