I ended up just downloading the texlive image and letting it go slightly stale while I wrote. Latex plays poorly with OS package managers and I decided I preferred to be out of date.

I made each chapter a separate file and compiled each one to latex. I had a top level latex file that did an \include{} for each chapter, and a big old Makefile to tie everything together, including figure generation.

All this, and it was still easier than writing every latex command by hand.