I agree with the importance of consistency, but disagree with "Office and (Neo)Vim aren’t exceptional examples of UI, but they are uniquely stable."
Office is not stable, at least over the long term. The hated "ribbon" marked a sad departure from the "stable" and efficient Word UI, and Microsoft's clueless regressions across the Windows platform have compounded the problem. For example, the deletion of the menu bar from applications. WTF.
Stabilizing on shit is a sad thing to double down on. But Microsoft is doing that at every opportunity now. Witness their offensive, relentless hounding to log in, log in, LOG IN WITH YOUR "MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!!!!!!"... or you can't do anything, including install Windows.
Thanks. I'm going to watch that MS video and see if I'm still as pissy about the ribbon afterward.
Ribbon aside, there are still lots of regressions in Word. The handling of styles, for example, which used to be excellent. Now Microsoft has stuffed the style list with dozens of asinine canned styles (most of which consist of different-colored underlines) that you can't get rid of. So instead of being able to format your document efficiently by selecting styles, you must now wade through a giant list of shit, looking for your own styles every goddamned time you want to apply one.
Just wait until the default template gets hacked up by some fluke in word and it's permanently stuck to weird formatting. you can revert it back but it's weirdly hidden and took me a Google to do it instead of just finding and clicking a "default word style format" theme thing.
This crap really drives me to use markdown and pandoc to crap out word files when I'm done. I also really hate how word deals with document formatting and images.
Office is not stable, at least over the long term. The hated "ribbon" marked a sad departure from the "stable" and efficient Word UI, and Microsoft's clueless regressions across the Windows platform have compounded the problem. For example, the deletion of the menu bar from applications. WTF.