You sound like aesthetics is a bad thing you need to disavow for some reason.
> Fine, TeX is an ugly language that only a programmer could love, but in over twenty years nobody has yet been able to replace its expressive power and flexibility
Which doesn't make it less ugly. If we can't cure common cold yet, that is no reason to praise it and making it sound as if it's a great thing. It is a problem and so is the need to use ugly language to produce aesthetically pleasing papers. The fact that we don't have solution for this problem yet does not turn it into non-problem. It just says nobody yet was good enough to solve it.
> Fine, TeX is an ugly language that only a programmer could love, but in over twenty years nobody has yet been able to replace its expressive power and flexibility
Which doesn't make it less ugly. If we can't cure common cold yet, that is no reason to praise it and making it sound as if it's a great thing. It is a problem and so is the need to use ugly language to produce aesthetically pleasing papers. The fact that we don't have solution for this problem yet does not turn it into non-problem. It just says nobody yet was good enough to solve it.