Text-based workflow has one significant advantage over GUI-based design: diffability. This enables patch-based collaboration: you can easily share your diff with others, review changes line-by-line, resolve conflicts between concurrent modifications, etc.
Personally, I'm much more comfortable working on large documents in LaTeX compared to Word because I can see every change I make and easily revise/revert it. It's too easy to unintentionally hit some shortcut or button in a WYSIWYG editor that subtly changes the document and not realize it until much later, when the undo stack is useless.
Personally, I'm much more comfortable working on large documents in LaTeX compared to Word because I can see every change I make and easily revise/revert it. It's too easy to unintentionally hit some shortcut or button in a WYSIWYG editor that subtly changes the document and not realize it until much later, when the undo stack is useless.