About the compatibility story...

I use LaTeX because the other options tend to suck more, but I sure hope something more solid replaces it. As of now, I understand TeX enough to wonder if it really seemed a good idea even when it was invented; but, granted, the TeX part is relatively solid, in the same way perhaps as MS-DOS is relatively solid and it's all the applications causing all the problems.

I think one big problem that I've seen in my field of CS is that people have become used to the output of LaTeX to the extent that everything else looks "unprofessional" to them merely by virtue of being different, even if it fixes some real annoyance in LaTeX output.

So while I still do my maths and typesetting often in LaTeX, I'm actually happy that the modern practitioners are refusing to take that route, even if it means them using Word. We shouldn't teach people to rely on stuff built on MS-DOS and Cobol either, even if the best typesetting tool remains some obscure DOS executable.