I'd never author a paper directly in latex. That would suck. I'd author in Pandoc markdown, convert to latex, and then add tables and whatever using latex around it. It's pretty painful IMO to write documents in latex vs markdown.
In that case you have a perfect example of starting with org-mode instead: Then you can already add tables and images and all the stuff and have much less finetuning to do:
- create draft in org
- export to LaTeX
- polish for publication
