Fascinating! I wonder if these findings scale to larger documents. As a novice user (both self-professed, and by the standards of the report) of both packages I've long found that Word becomes rather inconvenient once you pass a certain number of pages. Its internal structure is rather opaque, so sometimes when formatting goes awry it turns out to be quite difficult to fix. And it won't put non-text items in sensible places itself, though of course if you don't mind carefully positioning each one by hand then you can do that.
I actually much preferred using latex, even though it was so comically horrible in many respects (my Makefile had to run pdflatex 3 times, for example, and needed a whole other step to pre-convert PNGs into PDFs beforehand). More upfront investment, but less ongoing bother.
That just shows you the properties though, doesn't it? My usual problem is that the style properties seem OK, but the styles themselves are being applied to the wrong bits of text. Then when I try to fix it by removing the unwanted style from the incorrectly-styled portion, the section that was OK loses its style too! It's as if word's internal record of where each block of formatting begins and ends has got out of whack somehow, and when called upon to change a part of one styled section ends up changing the whole thing. (Or perhaps my mental model is wrong? But most of the tine, this sort of thing does work...)
This doesn't have to happen that many times to become really annoying...
I actually much preferred using latex, even though it was so comically horrible in many respects (my Makefile had to run pdflatex 3 times, for example, and needed a whole other step to pre-convert PNGs into PDFs beforehand). More upfront investment, but less ongoing bother.
Or cognitive dissonance, perhaps that was it?