pmt VS asciimathml

I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following:

LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors.

I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now—so much so that I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when I have more time.

[0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt

Or ascii math, http://asciimath.org

Sure thing, a quick search yields Asciimath which seems at least at first glance as huge improvement in the syntax department: http://asciimath.org

As for LaTeX in general, Markdown beats it soundly in most aspects.

What are the syntax differences to https://asciimath.org?

I did some Googling, and thought AsciiMath is the answer (simply because it also contains "Ascii" in the name). Turns out it's a different solution.

Math syntax is a bit more challenging, because I'm sure no one wants 12 even if that would make the grammar simpler. Attempts to do this are thin on the ground: as you note, Markdown and other similar tools completely punted on math. AsciiMath is one idea, although not what you want in a full-fledged typesetting language.

I like to use asciimath for this, though I realize that it's not as powerful as LaTeX or MathJax. There's a decent Rust port: asciimath-rs.

There's this:

http://asciimath.org/

I wish someone would integrate this into pandoc so I could use it in rmarkdown.