I would have to agree with you full-heartedly. MS-Word is now a very old program that's been around for almost 30 years. To be frank, I do not believe the program itself has improved much at all. And yes, the program has become bloated with support files that most people never use. I've used the earliest of both Windows and Mac versions of MS-Word and much later versions.

I see absolutely no difference between the Mac version MS-Word 2008 and 2011 which are currently on my Mac computer. MS-Word's memory abilities seem slow and old-fashioned for general functioning and carrying out processing on super large documents. MS-Word's clip-board memory is very slow and clunky when copying to or from Word to another document. Let's make a comparison. It can take 20-40 seconds or more to copy 30,000 lines of text to Word or from Word to another program's document. Apple's TextEdit takes 1-2 seconds to either copy the equivalent amount of text or paste to another apple document. TextEdit can easily edit and process a half million line document and do it within a couple of seconds. MS-Word cannot cope with such a large document. Anything larger than 50,000 lines and MS-Word simply crashes. So if you are writing a novel, MS-Word is not the program to use. I end up having to process large documents in parts at a time to stop MS-Word crashing.

I find MS-Word's auto-backup feature slow and unnecessary. I also find its auto-re-paginating tool extremely slow on very large documents. I mean waiting 10-15 minutes for it to re-paginate is totally ridiculous in today's computer world. Other processing of portions of a very large document also takes many minutes.

My Mac is a dual 3.2 GHz quad-core processors with 16 GB RAM and 4 x 1 TB drives. Why would a text processing program behave like it is running on a computer made 10-15 years ago? My first Mac was the 2002 Macintosh Classic II and I had MS-Word running on it for ages to do college work (that was either v5 or 6.) ( BTW I preferred WordPerfect on Windows.)

I can process 3D video rendering faster than MS-Word can process simple words of the English language lol.

I have tried OpenOffice but it lacks an important tool I use in MS-Word for processing an entire document.