Just get Lyx. It's a graphical front end for LaTeX, so you never actually write LaTeX. You don't have to worry about what's idiomatic at all, because you aren't writing it. You're just writing a document.
The best bit about LyX is using it to format LaTeX tables nicely.
When writing my thesis I used LyX but found myself creating more and more ERT (what LyX calls raw LaTeX code). I eventually just started using a text editor. However, I still do tables in LyX and copy them over -- such a pain to insert a column otherwise...
Complex formatting, such as figure captions and figure placement, in Word documents suddenly break for no apparent reason. Troubleshooting a “broken” Word doc is akin to fixing a typewriter while one is blindfolded.
