Though I thought that I had seen the extent of LATEX’s functionality in college and grad school, it would be at my first job where the true usefulness of program would come into view.
The fact that it processes plain text files opens up many doors over Word's proprietary format. For the seismic calculations that I was part of, LATEX was part of the report pipeline which required barely any interaction with a GUI.
Rather than creating documents word by word, the workflow allowed for the direct production of LATEXsections upon preprocessing of the FEM analysis. At this point I would realize that the limitations of Word documents and how plain text is just an overall more efficient method of transmitting ideas.
Example Images
One of the things that would get in my way during school, is that I would want to get the figures together before writing the paper. This was little more than just procrastination with more steps. Here is something that I wish that I had known about: place holder images which can be replaced with an image later, without disturbing formatting. I'm looking at you Microsoft Word. Go here for a full list of options. There is even an example movie, surprisingly.