(In a more serious vein: I, too, would have been interested to hear the “free as in freedom” defense of TeX, which would seem to apply equally to Abiword and lots of other things with a less steep learning curve. I think the practical advantage to *TeX is in its line- and page-breaking algorithms, which produce much nicer looking output, but for a lot of people that’s just not much of a selling point. The degree of formatting control TeX provides, particularly with external packages and style files, is also a more substantial plus; but at some level, TeX is like Linux — it’s hard to really grasp the advantages until after you’ve scaled the learning curve, which I suspect can make it a bit of a hard sell.)

Would be interesting to know the context of why “lack of choice” is bad? Was it a competition/capitalism meme?

– Chris