While happiness might need reason, life doesn't. I find that, in a way, we live in a probabilistic universe with enough attractors that allowed things to form. Among them were humans, now also building some things with/against the odds, and subsequent self-image/sense of importance.

You can still suspend thinking about the inevitability of death and inherent lack of meaning to feel or create something. It does require one to choose and get comfortable making choices that are beyond right and wrong (not in a moral sense), however.

I don't know if there is one answer for why people can still feel happy despite it all, and I suspect there will be different reasons. One reason could be that they've just accepted the futility, focusing on what makes them happy. Or maybe they've accepted that pursuing universality/objectivism when it comes to subjective things is impossible. Or maybe even that no matter which option one takes to view life, one cannot escape delusions.

I understand the context in which you're responding. It's a learning curve to adjust to a new writing environment that would be more apparent to students now, considering the last time they have learned about the editors they're switching from was years ago. Since OP is compiling a list of alternatives rather than one recommended product for graduate students studying OT and psychology, there's no harm in having LaTeX (+ editor) as one of those options. Considering the improved language support, templates, and the different editors out there for LaTeX, the barrier isn't as steep as coding from scratch IMO. People learn, it's not a big deal.

Sure, LyX has (had?) its quirks and isn't bug-free, but so did Excel with parsing gene names into dates for years, leading to scientists renaming genes as a bypass until MS provided a solution in 2023.

I see mention of LaTeX, imho forget about it. It’s great but if your students already are complaining about clicking a few buttons and menus in LO Writer, I doubt they will enjoy configuring LaTeX at all as it’s really complex to setup and it’s also very, very technical. (It is also very much English focused by default, which means there will be a few more tweaks required to make it support other languages and where that turns out to be real fun is that said tweaks may vary depending the libraries you’re relying on since you install various ones and, of course, the doc will not always be reflecting that exactly.)

All good suggestions, but this part is iffy. I've had course instructors provide boilerplate for students so that they don't need to worry about formatting. There are also WYSIWYG LaTeX editors like LyX. Finally, language support for LaTeX has expanded considerably over the years.

I wrote my MSc. thesis using Texmaker, and I've dabbled a bit with TeXstudio. I'm partial to Texmaker simply because of how easy it was to integrate bibliography and dictionaries, spin up code snippets/templates, customize build flows, debug errors, and embed different image types.

You can experiment with a few editors if you like. Ultimately, it's the one that you feel most comfortable that will work best because the code is the same.