The reason many publishers prefer MS Word is that it is the best choice at the editing stage. It is much easier to find copy-editors who will be able work efficiently with Word than any other system, with Adobe Indesign/Incopy being a distant second.
It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at present it does not exist.
Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very different thing to version control: version control is about storing and reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one, while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have different uses and fundamentally different semantics.
It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at present it does not exist.
Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very different thing to version control: version control is about storing and reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one, while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have different uses and fundamentally different semantics.