I agree that the learning curve for tikz and latex is greater than word. However I think it is disingenious to say that tikz and latex are no different when it comes to the initial and/or MWE learning curve. In my opinion tikz's learning curve is steeper. For starters there is no tikz equivalent of:

  $ nano mydoc.md ; pandoc -t latex -S -o mydoc.tex mydoc.md

Pandoc drastically reduces the initial learning curve for latex and beamer.

That being said tikz was one of the packages I thought was noticeably absent from the nine listed packages. The other package that I would add was fontspec, in fact I was shocked to see microtype and not see fontspec mentioned next.

That's a fair assessment. I drank the LaTeX koolaid >15 years ago when I didn't even have a clearly compelling reason to do so. Now back in school working on a PhD, and wondering why anyone wouldn't use it. How quickly we forget our learning pains.

You can use latex as mostly a markup language. Put in your default header and write your document with sections and so on.

I usually try to not worry about fine-tuning at all until the document is done, otherwise the whole point of latex is lost to me.