You would probably be surprised to learn that it is being used more and more, and by college students who are fed up with the limitation of MS Word, or its sudden tendency to renumber lists, or change list orders for no apparent reason. It is a documented fact that documents over 100 pages become a nightmare to handle in Word. Formatting suddenly starts changing for no apparent reason. On one recent document I was working on, I added a numbered item in a list to the middle of the list. Suddenly Word totally renumbered the document and changed the numbering from 2, 3, 4, etcetera to 102, 103, 104, bla - bla -bla. Using LaTeX, that sort of problem would be impossible.

By the way, virtually no one uses LaTeX as a stand alone product. I use TeXstudio as the front end, but there are others available.