In my experience, the only advantages LaTeX has over Word are mathematics typesetting and being able to be checked into source control. Word has a fair amount of powerful features for document layout, that are often much more easily discoverable than LaTeX (although there's no indication that "Replace All" means "replace all in selection" if you've selected it).
Word certainly has a number of powerful features, but every time I use it, I find it is really hard to have your document look consistent.
In LaTeX (or Markdown, or some other markup), it is pretty easy to enforce common style: font name, font size, indentation, space around figures, and so on.
In Word, not so much -- one bad copy-paste, and your document has a few words in unusual font, or "11.8" pt characters, or "1.17" line spacing. This is especially bad if you are working together, and some of your collaborators are using non-English language -- you see a mix of "Heading 1" and "Titre 1", each configured separately.
I am pretty happy that now that I am not longer in academia, I don't need to deal with either Word or LaTeX -- it's all Markdown, JIRA's markup or, in the extreme cases, Google Docs. Still, if I had to produce a fancy looking document today, I'd probably go for LaTeX with a GUI like Lyx -- good discoverability, and pretty clean .tex files on output.
