People that suggest this usually don't have experience using Tex. Tex may be hard to learn, but it is the best solution for the problem it is supposed to solve: high quality technical documents. Of course you can create something easier to use, but to achieve the same fine quality you'll need so much control that the system will end up more complicated than Tex.

If you really want Tex quality without much work, one can just use Lyx, a gui application that uses Tex as the backend.