I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really.
The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon.
It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer.
The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level.
I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples!
Madness
The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list.
The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
Hum... Yes. That's probably a major reason why it's harder to search.
The ribbon, on the other hand, reads like someone took all the icons off the toolbars, shook them up in a toybox full of other junk and clutter, and dumped it all out into a messy pile. Randomly sized icons, arrow menus, tabs, just scattered haphazardly all over.
There's no way that can be considered 'strictly superior' to a clean, straightforward, well-organized UI.
There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago).
So we have:
* Is actually no worse than the existing solution.
* Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution.
Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.