Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
The reason TeX is still used is because it is open source and beautiful, because it is the best at handling mathematical notation, and because of its inertial dominance in math and the hard sciences in Academia.  The reason TeX has so, so many fixable problems after 30 years is because there is no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.The answer is not to find a TeX alternative.  This will not be possible in Academia for a very long time.  The answer is for someone to plunk down a million dollars to hire some full-time developers to fix it.  Honestly, the TeX language is wonderful; it's the editors which are terrible.  A TeX editor should...[] seamlessly hide the compilation process[] feature a modern debugging environment[] make 99% of commands (including everything you can do in MS Word) discoverable within the editor, rather than sending the user to the internet or some pdf guide, and[] robustly handle all modern image types...without becoming an unstable WYSIWYG hybrid like LyX.  The only thing about the language itself that might need to be changed is some standardization of common packages.  I shouldn't need to download anything to get appendices and sub-figures to behave sensibly.The amount of professor, post-doc, and grad student time wasted on TeX is staggering, and easily justifies paying for an overhaul...if only the government or some benefactor would step up.