Exactly. I love the spirit and motivation behind Office Libre, but Excel and Word just _work_ for most basic tasks and an amazing number of corner cases. Open-source products just don't even come close.
The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.
At least Libre Writer has sane ways to anchor a picture to a paragraph / section / page.
I've lost my 100 hours trying to get Word to consistently place images in technical docs, only to wind up fighting some of the most unpredictable placement calculations I've ever encountered. I want to punch my screen right now just thinking about it.
I think one of the big problem of Word is that it is routinely used for things it was not designed for and which are still out of Microsoft target.
It's a tool for not too long technical documents, for secretarial work, for basic marketing text, for quick an dirty but decently presented invoices, for writing a resume.
It has never been meant for writing novels, for page setting, for writing hundreds of pages of technical documentation, and yet... it is used for that. Everyday.
But mainly because there are no viable alternatives that are available in multiple platforms, cost less or the same than Word, and do things significantly better.
InDesign is infinitely better for typesetting, but you're the learning curve to get something presentable is higher than LaTeX, because you have to know design, and more expensive than Word.
LyX is the only tool that comes close to replacing Word. It's free, significantly better typesetting, easy to use, and available in most platforms.
The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.