Microsoft Office 2008 - 12.2.3

I'd stopped using MS Office (in favor of Pages) shortly after I got my first Intel-based Mac, when office was still using Rosetta. I'd been using Word and Excel for Mac since they appeared as version 1.0 programs for the Mac OS (and MulitPlan before Excel appeared). I'd can't remember at what point I started using PowerPoint, but it was before MS bought it. By the time I chucked Office in favor of iWork, my primary complaint was the speed of using it with Rosetta. I could live with the fact that any document that used any reasonable quantity of numbered or bulleted lists was utterly incorrigible due to the way that Word automagically renumbered them in nonsensical ways. And I've always been comfortable enough with the customization features that I can change all the Windows-derived key combinations so that the program behaves like other Mac program.

So in the meantime I kept my versions of Office up-to-date, and then several months ago I finally switched back to using Office for Mac instead of iWork. After struggling with Office 2008 for several months, I have concluded that this version of Office (Mac Office 2008) is the worst office-type software that I've ever used:

Performance is still quite poor and generally choppy, even on my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo laptop with 8GB RAM. When creating any document of any sophistication, the formatting randomly changes in unpredictable ways, sophisticated use of styles can render a document virtually un-editable, and the program crashes when you have to do any sophisticated task in repetition -- it harkens back to the dark days of OS 7.5, when you had to be in the habit of hitting CMD-S every 10 seconds in order to be productive, lest you lose your work when the computer froze next.

I cannot understand how it is that people can be productive using this software, MS Office 2008 for Mac. Seriously, I recently did a consulting gig that required me to maintain several rather sophisticated documents that ultimately constituted the deliverables of the engagement. I ended up maintaining them in Office 2007 on Windows XP using (at intervals) Parallels and Boot Camp, because (in spite of the horrid user ribbon-based user interface) it actually did work. If I were in charge Microsoft, this piece of software would be enough to justify considering firing the leaders of the Mac Business Unit.

There must have been a ton of fixes in 12.2.3 that MS didn't announce, because I have personally found Office 2008 after installing 12.2.3 to be much more responsive than it was previously. Everything is pretty snappy now, even things like copy/paste which was extremely slow in Excel prior to the update. Finally the suite is fully usable - but how ridiculous that it took so long from its first release to get here? It certainly doesn't encourage me to buy the next version when it first comes out...

Anyone else have similar experiences?