> the ease of use of MS Word.

I honestly find MS Word extremely difficult to use. Like, I'm always fighting against the incorrect assumptions it's doing on my text, and against an unknown amount of invisible state that changes my formatting as I type.

I've used LyX extensively and love it. I found that it made typing up lecture notes literally three times as fast. I can't imagine how I could have finished my PhD thesis without it. (Actually I can: with months more spent writing up!)

But I consider it to be a timesaving tool that's more advanced than regular LaTeX. Often you don't need to deal with the fiddly bits, but you still need to understand how they work. Especially if you get a compilation error (er, typesetting error?). They're much rarer with LyX, but because simple problems (e.g. missing brace) are impossible, when you do occasionally get one it's bound to be a doozy! Plus when you need a LaTeX feature that LyX doesn't support natively (rare but inevitable) you still need to know how to write it in LaTeX plus how to use LyX's math macros or modules language if you want to make it seamless.

I think this is why LyX struggles to get a big user base. Beginners end up getting stuck and going back to LaTeX. Advanced users see it and think "I don't need this – I already know LaTeX!"

I always thought I'd find Lyx more useful than I do. I tried it many times, and it works; it just doesn't offer a speed or ease advantage over writing LaTeX for me out of the box. Maybe that's because I used LaTeX for a while before discovering Lyx, but the speed improvements are overcome by the clunkiness and unfamiliarity of the interface, where the ease of using a familiar text editor gives LaTeX the edge.

Really clever project though, and I hope there are a lot of people whom it does help.

If you care about precise formatting, it's much easier to use than word. LyX encourages you to use defined styles and avoid formatting quirks, compared with Word where you need to be very careful not to insert little inconsistencies.

The main problem with lyx is with the lyx file format. If the "native" file format were plain TeX or LaTeX files it would be much more useful, facilitating the collaboration of lyx and non-lyx users on the same file.

Yeah, Word-style "WYSIWYG" versus LaTeX-style source-code + compiling is really a pretty big philosophical difference. Some people much prefer the latter, and will avoid WYSIWYG LaTeX tools. The marked up source code gives you much better control, and you can use semantic macros that for example allow you to change how you format vectors or chapter titles etc. across the whole document easily.

See a marginally relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/2109/

Maybe you know this, but LyX is somewhere in the middle.

You can see roughly what you are doing while writing, which makes some things much easier. Especially typing in large formulae (and double-checking that you didn't make a mistake). Although the way you enter them is more typing than point-and-clicking.

For something like changing how the chapter titles look, you are pretty much back in the world of Latex, trying out some macro to change all of them.