That is the primary reason I keep office around for as well. No alternative offers decent footnotes / endnotes / reference without going to latex (that I have found). For something as simple as a two page paper for an undergrad class, I do not want have to use latex just to get footnotes done correctly. I would be interested to know if the latest version actually does any better.

What difficulties are you having with footnotes? I just finished working on a 200 and something page document in LibreOffice 4.3, with multiple footnotes on most pages (and mildly complicated things like re-starting the numbering for each chapter), and working with footnotes seemed pretty straightforward. I'd be interested to find out how your (and the parent poster's) experience differed from mine.

Sadly, it still has issues with importing footnotes/endnotes.[1] It was one of the main reasons cited by our marketing team for resisting LibreOffice and going with MS Office 2010 instead.

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58521

LaTeX is totally worth it. I started off by using the LaTeX plugin in LibreOffice to do formulas. Eventually I realized that I could just do the whole paper in LaTeX. It isn't too hard and there is a stackexchange site for LaTeX that is very helpful as well.

LaTeX is good if you wish you could program documents, include them in source control, use complex macros, etc.

If you don't want to learn a new programming language to create documents then something wysiwyg is better.