I love how beautiful the output of TeX is. But I utterly hate the 
trouble and strife of trying to alter how it does its job in even the 
most trivial way.

I guess the fundamental problem is that TeX forces you to write 
imperative instructions describing what actions to perform, rather than 
allowing you to declaratively specify what you want the final result to be.

(And the *other* problem is that back when TeX was designed, you had to 
actually care about whether the character set was ASCII or EBCDIC.)

For example, I want to typeset all my source code examples in dark green 
instead of black. No problem. Define a new environment that inserts a 
"change to green" command right before you start typing.

Oh, wait. Only THE FIRST LINE of text comes out green. The rest is 
black. WTF?

Now I guess I could go digging and try to figure out what deep, dark 
command sequence LaTeX is executing at each line end and start hacking 
away at it. But I'd really rather not. So let's see if I can use 
grouping to apply the colour change to everything...

Ah yes, that works. Now the whole example is green.

EXCEPT when the code fragment just happens to fall on the very first 
line of a page, in which case it unexplicably comes out black again. 
*facepalm*

If only you could take the beautiful fonts and wonderful typesetting 
engine of TeX and stick it in a modern, modular, extensible framework. :-P

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