I understand your frustration. Maybe it helps to know where this problem comes from.

TeX is extremely powerful and lets you create arbitrary documents. This is the first time I heard of quarto, but apparently it makes a lot of choices for you that you understandably don't really care about.

Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so:

    \newcommand{\image}[2]{\begin{figure}[t]\includegraphics{#2}\caption{#1}\label{#2}\centering\end{figure}}

Now you can just write:

    \image{caption}{path/to/image}

Of course, it is now much less flexible, as you cannot define a custom label or different placement instructions. But that is the price you pay for short and memorable syntax.

By the way, developing a LaTeX class is not necessarily hard. It is more or less a file whose name ends in `.cls` with all the commands that you typically put in your preamble. It just needs a header of three lines that define some meta data and also supports options. See here for an example: https://github.com/latex-ninja/colour-theme-changing-class-t...

You put it in the same directory as your main tex file or in the system wide TEXMFHOME or user-specific TEXMHFHOME.

> in quarto - it's just markdown:

    >    ![Caption](path/to/image.png)

> And here is how you do it in TeX:

    >    \begin{figure}[t]
    >    \includegraphics{path/to/image}
    >    \centering
    >    \end{figure}

This is not the same thing! The LaTeX equivalent to your markdown would be

     \includegraphics{path/to/image.png}

which is arguably simpler and cleaner than the markdown. The figure environment is unnecessary when you just want to put a figure right there. You only need the figure environment when you want your image to "float" to a random place in your page.

I can tell you as another academic i almost always get links and images wrong in Markdown (which of title URL is in square which in round brackets, forgetting the !, the conventions around file paths (some Markdown processors need file://...). Admittedly if I would write always one Markdown style I would get used to it, on the other hand I never get it wrong in latex and let's not even talk about how to do different alignment, captions and labels.

> I don't know how to create a class file, or a template (if that is a LaTeX thing). And since I've never seen anyone else do this, I guess that most academics don't either.

Exactly, academics usually don't do that - they write the text with appropriate markup, and then put it in the publisher's template and the formatting according to the appropriate standards is done. You can write your own template, but usually you use someone else's, with the big benefit that you can generally move your content to a very different template of a different publisher with minimal or no changes to your actual writing.

Now how would I do that in quarto - what (and how much) would I need to write to ensure that, for example, the captions for all the images and all the references to the images are all formatted in a specific manner? Because for quarto I would need to make my own template specifying the exact formatting and layout, and a quick browse of its documentation didn't lead me to any examples on how I would control that.

In sane environments there is a split between text and formatting, however, the formatting part has to be sufficiently powerful to meet the various requirements, so there is a certain quite high minimum bar to meet there. Latex works because I can rely that I will be able to easily get my markup laid out exactly as required by arbitrary standards, for any markdown-type standards I need some assurance that this will be possible and easy, that I won't need to (for example) go over all my references and do something to them.

Again, apples and oranges. Yes it's more markup than e.g. markdown (which is fundamentally less capable) But how do you do the equivalent ot the [t] and \centering in the former on a per figure bases? what about scaling it differently from other figures in your doc, or embedding a reference in caption with a particular style?

For that matter your equivalent is still one line, it's just \includegraphics{path}. The figure environment is just adding extra capabilities.

I agree not everyone needs to do this, but the trade offs you are illustrating are not "X is better than Y" so much as "X is simpler than Y, and can't do as many things"

For you that trade-off makes sense, great. But I wouldn't generalized it to the value of the tool. I know plenty of academics who are quite proficient at Tex, let alone the simpler Latex, and find it lets them generate the content they want easily enough, given it's power.

This isn't just mathematicians either, though most of the people I know using it came to that out of a need to do math typesetting properly. How would you for example generate a mixed language document with both left-to-right and right-to-left languages formatted correctly?

LaTeX's real problem isn't the syntactic load (easily handled with a decent editor) it's the package system. It can be abused to e.g. generate conference posters well, but it's hairy once you get into the details.

That’s a great of the tradeoff. On the surface the latex version looks harder, but you can specify a caption, how the figure floats with other items, how it’s justified, the zoom level, you can add a reference label that you can hyperlink to from elsewhere in the doc, etc etc etc.

The markdown one you get what you get. Maybe that’s fine. If it isn’t you are out of luck.

The latex one requires more of you but gives you much more functionality in return.

Which is better is going to be entirely situational/personal preference.