I think the problem is that these older people are probably looking for some kind of logic they can understand from first principles. They're used to doing stuff by directly acting.

The idea that you might have to randomly drag around an image a bit to hopefully get Word to lay it out the way you want, without actually even knowing what "the way you want" is until you see it, must be pretty alien.

To me, it's a million line layout algorithm, I don't know how it works, I don't particularly care to spend years learning all hardcoded edge cases it propably has, I just know that I've always been able to get it to work, even if sometimes I don't know how I did it. To them, it's probably like trying to use a chainsaw at the end of a slinky, they're expecting it to do what they say, but it doesn't offer any way to tell it what to do, just some latent variables that are kind of related to what you want.