My understanding and experience is that Latex has a significant learning curve and Pandoc provides a more gentle front end.
Of course Latex gives you fine control to hand tune the engine…but that doesn’t seem like what the OP is looking for.
Since hammers and nails are a common tool-workpiece example…consider the nail gun.
Theoretically you can drive nails with a 22 caliber blank cartridge without making the “call” through a nail gun. But you won’t finish laying shingles as quickly and easily…
Or to put it another way, there’s a reason assemblers are almost always better than machine code and compilers are almost always better than assemblers for the ends people care about.
I mean why use Latex at all when you could write your own typesetting language? Maybe because you are not a knuth.
Sure, I don't mean that anyone would look at the Latex in between. I'm just saying that if tool x directly calls tool y to do the job then might as well use tool y directly.