I had the opposite feeling. I wrote my PhD thesis in 1998-2000 and the editor of choice at the time was Word.
It was a pain to deal with the formatting, spacing, page breaking and other -ings.
I then tried LaTeX and all problems vanished. Since I could not influence the output (at least without a lot of work) I simply gave up and started to "code my text". It was way faster than admiring my artful working all the time, I just complied the text from time to time and I was done.
Markdown is a must. I used it on dynamic blog and on my static site, but I paid less attention to my writing when posts were not "live".
I believe that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle concept of minimising the time between having an idea and seeing a change universally applies to every user kind of interface.
I then tried LaTeX and all problems vanished. Since I could not influence the output (at least without a lot of work) I simply gave up and started to "code my text". It was way faster than admiring my artful working all the time, I just complied the text from time to time and I was done.
This is how I see Markdown today.