What pain points would it have saved to write the scientific paper in org-mode? Usually there's a dozen dirty little corners where you want fine-grained control and the org-mode-to-latex converter isn't giving you that by default.

I once wrote a short report that I (probably) could also have written in (any equivalent of) Word or LyX/TeXmacs, or some random WISYWIG editor. Very little finetuning of the layout required or necessary, people still liked it better than plaintext (it had some headlines and tables and stuff, but nothing too fancy). So, nice output yes but be careful if what you need is actual LaTeX document preparation.