Design+publishing is inherently complicated and that complexity is conserved; you make one part of it simpler, you necessarily make another part harder. This is true of print publishing and it is true of web publishing, and they each have their own stacks. Any attempt to combine the two is going to have its own complexity. For this reason most people aren't interested in going there, so the tooling can seem very rudimentary compared with the tools that exist in either medium in isolation.

Pollen and Racket seemed arcane at first. But both are elegant, well-documented tools with extremely helpful communities. Delving into them has been probably the most rewarding experience I’ve had with anything computer-related, and that experience is still ongoing.