LO has its own platform abstraction layer (called SAL), which only supported pixel-precise layout of elements. That meant that the longest string in any of the supported languages dictated the element layout.
Caolán McNamara (of RedHat) added support for automatic layouts a few years ago. Since then, LO has been cleaning up its dialogs and has innovated a lot (e.g. by introducing the notebook bar). This simply wouldn’t have been possible previously. Compare it with Apache OpenOffice and you’ll see why.
Sure. An amazing engineering feat... but the UI still looks the same as it did years ago. Compare the UI to MS Office, WPS Office, Softmaker Office, etc and rank the UIs by level of polish.
Caolán McNamara (of RedHat) added support for automatic layouts a few years ago. Since then, LO has been cleaning up its dialogs and has innovated a lot (e.g. by introducing the notebook bar). This simply wouldn’t have been possible previously. Compare it with Apache OpenOffice and you’ll see why.