The interesting thing about switching from org to pure LaTeX for my thesis is that while both have very excellent tooling in #emacs, org-mode and auctex are written by different people with very different designs. They feel very different, despite both being emacs.
Part of that is likely also the differences between the languages: LaTeX is way more verbose for simple things than org, however for complex things (especially around figures) org syntax gets more in the way than that of LaTeX.