Are you saying it's impossible to format a paper in Word to please you? Seems like there's a lot of options to get the look you want.

Well folks who prepare documents in Word, esp. formal documents, more often than not, pick the default rendering of Times New Roman (and I know the default in MS-Word is not TNR).

And a standard MS-Word TNR document looks like crap. I'm sorry.

But I have to admit I have an over-reaction to seeing an MS-Word document after spending more than a decade working with TeX/LaTeX exclusively. So part of the blame goes to me, and actually hurts my ability to keep up with the literature when I start avoid MS-Word papers.

Yeah, the default Word style definitely isn't anything like a typeset document. For fun I downloaded the "Latex.dot" template and some computer modern fonts, with those you can make a first approximation of the Latex look in Word but it's still not the same.

I've never been a fan of the Computer Modern font but the page layout and formating in Latex is certainly nice and just having a standard for scientific papers is a plus.