Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!

I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.

So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done? Who should get the least amount of surprise?

Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.

In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.