Oh, I agree that sometimes Word is annoying. But most people don't do really persnickety formatting on documents they make, and find the GUI easier to use. LaTeX or something like that certainly is better if you take the time to learn it and need the ability to do unusual formatting or complicated layouts.
For example, lots of linguistics figures are much easier to do (such as the aforementioned sentence trees) in LaTeX, which is why some of the linguistics professors I know use LaTeX most of the time.
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