I guess I'm misunderstanding then. Word's core feature is wysiwyg. Word as a document format is necessarily unstructured - "hey I'm gonna increase the font size of this text over here by like 12 or 14 pts or whatever and switch it to center identation and write 'Chapter 3'" -- that's the 'killer feature' of Word that defines it. Structural stuff like the idea of chapters or version keeping are all secondary to the defining wysiwyg feature.

If the goal is structure+change tracking, it seems like switching from an unstructured document format to a format/combination of formats that provides structure+change tracking is an easy slam dunk. Structure and interoperability with version control systems are both first class features of latex. Structure and version control are secondary features of Word. ...Why?

One of the great epiphanies of engineering is that my "the" definining feature is not your "the" defining feature. Also that there is actually considerable depth to applications and industries outside one's own.

Word supports semantic structuring as well, and one can even disable direct styles manipulation.

As for why, industry standards.

How can you disable direct styles manipulation? I’ve looked for that feature and never found it (although in response I just gave up on Wod as a serious tool for anything beyond short letters)

Say more about what you can't seem to find here. The idea that Word is not a serious tool, or is not suitable for anything longer than a letter, is just laughably false given how widely used it is in pursuits orders of magnitude more complex than a letter to your Aunt Millie.

I'm being a LITTLE snarky, but I also am genuinely offering to help, if you want it.

Not the parent poster, but I believe he asked how you can disable direct (ad-hoc) styles manipulation? That's something I'm also interested in - my ideal Word document would be the one in which I define styles to be used and every paragraph uses exactly one of these styles and the user can't say "I'll make these few words 14pt just because".

For example, https://www.officetooltips.com/word_2016/tips/protecting_wor...

I believe another replier has noted how one may do that.

IIRC Word used to have an "outline editing" mode where normal visual styles were largely ignored and replaced with a uniform set of rendering styles. Its principal feature was the ability to fold nested structures (chapters, sections, etc) and easily reorder them.

It still does. The macOS version has it in the menu bar: View > Outline.

And if you disable it, some helpful co-worker will helpfully re-enable it and add a bunch of red text as "comments".

It sounds like you're not familiar with what Word's traditional strength over other word processors was, even back in the DOS version days: support for semantically meaningful structured documents + stylesheets to attach to those structures.

It's a big deal. I live in emacs for most of my writing and notetaking, but I love using Word to create structured documents for clients (e.g., implementation guidelines, etc) because it's easy and works very very well, and I don't have a weird toolchain on the back end of the process to produce something they can easily consume.

The tl;dr here is that it is incorrect to say that Word is a WYSIWYG editor only necessarily and only capable of unstructured work. Sure, lots of people only ever use it that way, but it has strong support for document structure and intelligent styling (to say nothing of internal change tracking), and this is what makes it a good (and popular!) choice for large-scale document work.

Indeed - a co-worker long ago introduced me to the power of references and if you deal with contracts or legal documents that reference other parts of a document nothing else comes close!