I am (among other things) a writer, with no background in programming. I began using WordPerfect under MS-DOS in 1989, and though vastly preferring it to MS Word (primarily for its Reveal Codes feature), have begun to see its limitations: no support for Unicode, Open Type features or Graphite, and its line-by-line justification/hyphenation parsing. Full Unicode and Graphite support became critical for a particular project, and web searches on these topics brought me to TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX in the spring of 2013 (and now looking into LuaLaTeX). It comes pretty naturally to me, using only the usual web tutorials and package manuals, but when I need to troubleshoot something, the most often-useful site out there seems to be the TeX Stack Exchange.