I wrote an open-source reader for docx, including for math equations, in a week or two of part-time hobby work. The spec isn't always sensible (though I'm sure there are historical reasons for most of the decisions) but it's always easy enough to look at the xml and figure it out. Most importantly, your language only requires a zip lib and an xml parsing lib. So, yeah, I'd say it's much nicer to deal with than what this article describes.