I also work in the humanities. While learning to set up a very basic Scrivener+Pandoc workflow, I came across Quarto and felt curious but discouraged from delving further into it, since Pandoc is already very demanding for me.
But in contrast to @talazem, my workflow is still at a very early stage, as shown by this recent thread where I basically was taught to tell the difference between reference documents and templates.
So, judging from that thread, I probably still do not have a proper workflow that works for me, because what I can do is pretty basic. Before I move into more advanced uses of Pandoc, and effectively create my set of templates, reference documents, filters, and so on, would anyone advise that I take a step back and learn Quarto instead? Would things be easier for me, at least at this basic stage?
For background: I started learning Pandoc because I need to use Scrivener alongside Zotero for handling references. Scrivener’s default MultiMarkdown to .odt and Pandoc to .docx do not give me that option. Following this wiki, I obtained the desired results. I would probably not have tried to learn Pandoc were it not for this need.