Thank you so much for researching this topic. I have often felt this to be the case in my own work, but have often encountered fierce resistance from LaTeX users based on what I believed to be specious claims of increased productivity. I also find that productivity in manuscript preparation has many other bottlenecks as well, of which one of the most important is the ability to collaboratively work on a document. For collaboration, I think Google Docs is a clear winner, personally.

I will say that for very large documents, like PhD theses, LaTeX is invaluable. But for the majority of documents one encounters in scientific life, it is more burdensome.