I believe that if you do "Get Info" on an individual application, you can disable Retina rendering for it. The OS will render it with the full non-retina code path into a non-Retina-sized buffer and then upscale it to fit on your screen at normal size (but with terrible resolution, of course). May help.

Have you tried iWork?

I use Pages as my go-to word-processor and Numbers (on account of its table-in-sheet paradigm) is my favourite spreadsheet by far. I wish they’d beef the latter up a bit with ODBC access and support for iterated solution (very useful for balancing projected cashflow where interest-on-short-term-debt & amount-of-short-term-debt depend on each other) and something more akin to pivot tables.

Pity, it could really be a thermonuclear option, instead they just add useless stuff like collaboration features and smart annotations....

I’ve never really used Keynote because that simply isn’t in my line of work.

I really think Apple has a winner on their hands and are handicapping it deliberately either out of neglect or because they didn’t want to scare Microsoft off back in the day and have some kind of gentleman’s agreement going...

Pretty much any time there’s a viable alternative to a Microsoft product, I find the alternative to be a breath of fresh air. There’s something about Windows software in general that makes me feel like I’m in a prison camp relative to good macOS applications.

OmniGraffle vs Visio. Keynote vs PowerPoint. Numbers vs Excel.

I know precisely what you’re referring to. I used to call it the “Cocoa Smell” when I’d come across an application designed for OS X’s native APIs and not some port of something more or less haphazard.

I suppose now they’re more varied (SwiftUI or whatever the technology of the day may be), but there’s a distinct “this is native” vibe from certain alternative applications that doesn’t emanate from others.

Your comment boils down to "whenever there's a better alternative, I like the better alternative better."

Then again, Google Apps is a viable alternative to MS Office, and fresh air it is not.

Doesn't Excel have a similar table system?

As a non-retina display user, LibreOffice works fine, and it is multiple gigabytes smaller than even a single Microsoft Office application.

What are you using word processing for? Of all the todo list apps I've tried or bought, Emacs' org-mode is my favorite.

Mainly I use it when people send me documents to proof/ comment on.

Learning org mode is on my todo list. (Ironic?)

I found it more tolerable running it at 50% resolution.

Still horrible though.

I've had good experiences with OnlyOffice on macOS.