​Toby - that's a tad inflammatory - at least to my American sensibilities. Saying one or the other has been "dressed up" (using a derogatory term or not) is to me the same as the vi/emacs wars or rugby/American Football argument.   Some people like the taste of one, others do not, and thank goodness we have choices.   I've used the afore mentioned systems (and played the games too at a fairly high level in my day); and frankly it is a matter if taste.  They all have their place.

If you grew up with an affinity for one, you are more likely to find it more comfortable for your needs.  I find a TeX just as ugly and unreadable as  the runoff family with troff is a member.   It's just a different view of beauty.  Frankly, Brian Reid's Scribe on the "Twinex" and VMS was the "best" document product system I ever really used (for those that do not know, LaTex was an attempt to bring Scribe-like functions into TeX).    But as Brian Kernighan points out in his "Page Makeup" paper, even Scribe had some flaws (it's too bad Scribe seems to have been lost to IP and source issues - I've often wonder how it would have played out in the modern world).

Anyway - it fine to say you don't like troff - please feel free to suggest that you don't think that it can be made to your style/preferences.   But please don't sling to many insults as the truth is, that troff is still useful to many people and a lot people do still like it.

In my own case, I'll use TeX if a colleague wants too, but I'm a fair bit faster with troff than almost any other doc prep system for any document of almost any size; but particularly when the documents get large such as book.   But that's me; although I note it is also a lot of other people.   As Brian points out, many of the Pearson and Wiley texts use troff; and of course you have to note that my old deskmate, Tim O'Reilly founded his empire on it 😂 (I still have a copy of the his original style manual they wrote for the Masscomp engineers and doc writers in the mid 80s).

Clem