That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done countless presentations using Beamer.

I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was completely non-obvious to me.

The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to me.

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coliveira 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand it.

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whatever1 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Oh definitely, let’s do a PhD in Latex and its worthless toolchain before start writing the actual thesis.

Software should be invisible and not a hindrance to our ability to express ourselves.

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volemo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh, you mean those 500 pages of dense Knuth writing?

	▲	stevesimmons 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dense? The TeX book is a total delight to read.