But I also suspect this does not apply to something like a word processor document, where you likely use Word or something similar?

Actually, I use Vim editor to enter LaTeX or ConTeXt code for all my documents. I find Word clunky and hard to use, OpenOffice and LibreOffice are even worse.

A good references and media manager that would work with a variety of mark up languages would be a nice thing to have, though. I personally would prefer something keyboard driven over dragging things with mouse, but so far I have not find either.

And all such edits would be handled much easier via a WYSWIG editor.

YMMV, but I find that editing structured documents is much faster using plain text, than a WYSIWYG editor. That is if the mark up language is not idiotically verbose, like XML.

Don't waste time doing what a computer can do better than you.

Exactly! Why should I waste time formatting the document, when the computer will easily do it for me. I just type what I want to say, and let the computer place it on the screen.

This is probably the stupidest rant I have read in a long time.

If that is really a problem, why don't you make an editor shortcut that will automatically expand frameCounter++ to frameCounter = frameCounter + 1? Who still types out every little piece of repetitive code these days?

If I waited till the class is over and _then_ started to write down the notes based on what I recall, I probably can recall 15% to 20% of the total thing.

Sure, but then you would actually recall that stuff, not only when taking the notes, but also on the exam, next semester in the subsequent class, in the future on the job, etc. With your current system, if you cannot recall more than 15 - 20% right after the lecture, how much will you recall later on?

...physical books don't crash or get data corruption...

I simply cannot agree with that, in light of one particular incident that happened when I was in fourth grade. On the way from school, with bunch of friends, we happened to pass a nice sledding hill. Since we had no sleds with us, we improvised and used our school bags as sleds. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that in addition to my textbooks, I also had a large bottle of white glue in the bag, for some sort of school project. I don't know if what happened to the books could be described as crashing, but it certainly was a major data corruption. Of course, I am not even trying to imagine what would happen these days if I had an ebook reader or an ipad in that backpack.

Actually, at least in the case of college textbook, this is really largely irrelevant. It is the professor who selects the textbook, and, hopefully, she knows her subject well enough to be able to distinguish good books from crap.

C'est possible. People will be people, and their random personality quirks will be, well, random. I personally never experienced that, but as they say, YMMV.

Traditionally, people wrote free software that they themselves found useful. A developer would decide he or she does not like any existing html editors, so they would write a new one. They would release it as free software, since they were not interested in marketing it, and getting feedback and code contributions from users was more valuable for them than getting money for the product. That's how what you call OSS community works. If a developer is telling you "you don't need a wysiwyg editor", what they are really saying is "I don't need a wysiwyg editor, I believe you don't either, but if you think otherwise, go and write one." They are not being arrogant, they are trying to be helpful. You are the arrogant one, for thinking everybody has to write the software you find useful, and give it to you for free.

To be fair, the Knuth's original compiler could produce pretty amazing things. It had neither all the cool microtypography features pdftex has, nor the font selection possibilities of luatex or xetex, but it was quite capable. Lamport just simply did not care about the way his documents looked. I actually remember when all the guys in our physics department started switching over to LaTeX and constantly talked about it, most of our reaction was like: "that's a pretty neat macro package, but boy does it look ugly!"

Anyway, this whole discussion brought back some fond memories of the mid 90's great and endless "HTML standards vs. artistic design" usenet debates.