They were of mixed generations; most in their 30s, and a few older than that.
If I had to make a wild guess, I'd say it had to do with the fact that most of them were from Asia. My gut feeling is that Latex has a bigger following in the "western" world than the "eastern" one. Again, wild conjecture on my part; especially since I have not yet spent any time in an Asian country myself.
This is probably true, though in China/computer science, we are seeing increased LaTeX usage. The problem is that LaTeX isn't that great of an experience for writing papers in Chinese, which doesn't have the kerning problems of western character sets anyways.
If I had to make a wild guess, I'd say it had to do with the fact that most of them were from Asia. My gut feeling is that Latex has a bigger following in the "western" world than the "eastern" one. Again, wild conjecture on my part; especially since I have not yet spent any time in an Asian country myself.