Is what you’re describing something that latex handles well? I’m no expert, but that problem seems solvable by rendering previews with say sampling of large or complex objects vs full builds that maybe take a minute if high fidelity animations or very large graphs are desired as a supported use case in something fully open source
Writing and editing an entire book manuscript is slow.
For pesky TeX chaos smashups, you create a small dedicated TeX file with necessary driver files, edit-compile-loop till satisfied.
Twenty years ago I ran a makefile producing 1755 pages on a 32 bit INTeL CPU.
This was just to see what a fat book would look like, thousands of edits remained, still remain. All the two-column formatting was fine, except for problems of long equations and tables blowing up beyond the column, and other mess I couldn't solve. The compile run time was insignificant.
BTW its laTeX not LaTeX.
Donald Knuth's original creation will ever be infinitely more
significant than the sprawling ocean of all the crumpled paper bag shenanigans Leslie and whomever-ephemeral else, RUSTy-paper-clips to the side.
