> Math fonts and plain text fonts should be different. If you put quotes around something, you get plain text font.

Why? LaTeX defaults to Computer Modern for both text in math and normal text. And if you want to change just the math font in Typst I'm pretty sure you can do that with a one line set rule.

> Probably the first rule of any good typographical system is that it should not force the user to change how they normally write (barring special exceptions). Any syntax for typography should be additional to this, which is why escape syntax is so good. Forcing the user to put spaces between variables is a no go.

Did you have a habit of putting backslashes before everything before you used TeX? This is a nonsense standard. The math that appears in papers is mostly special characters and so it makes sense to prioritize the syntax for that over implicit multiplication, which is often written with spaces anyway.

Yeah, I have all of my textbooks full of \frac{}{}, that’s definitely how I write math..

We had programming languages that didn't require spaces back in the 80s. It led to code like this:

    10 IFA=3ANDB=5THENPRINT"HELLO"