A few years ago, my brothers were simultaneously writng their Masters theses (in civil engineering, where LaTeX is not exactly common).
One of them decided to plunge into LaTeX. It took him a week or so to get productive, but once everything was set up, it "just worked" and he could focus on his thesis.
The other one decided to stick to the conventional choice, Microsoft Word. He started writing immediately because Word is what he's familiar with, but when the deadline neared, he descended into near-madness as he fought Word's hobby of breaking the entire layout whenever a new character is inserted.
In the end, you're always going to have to invest some amount of time for the typesetting of a thesis or paper. But LaTeX has the advantage of letting you plan when to pay that cost. (Up to a certain point, of course. The final layout is "final" for a reason.)
When the deadline neared, [I] descended into near-madness trying to get LaTeX put the correct page numbers where I wanted them, don't have empty blocks of whitespace in arbitrary places and actually render citations as it did all the weeks before.
A few years ago, my brothers were simultaneously writng their Masters theses (in civil engineering, where LaTeX is not exactly common).
One of them decided to plunge into LaTeX. It took him a week or so to get productive, but once everything was set up, it "just worked" and he could focus on his thesis.
The other one decided to stick to the conventional choice, Microsoft Word. He started writing immediately because Word is what he's familiar with, but when the deadline neared, he descended into near-madness as he fought Word's hobby of breaking the entire layout whenever a new character is inserted.
In the end, you're always going to have to invest some amount of time for the typesetting of a thesis or paper. But LaTeX has the advantage of letting you plan when to pay that cost. (Up to a certain point, of course. The final layout is "final" for a reason.)