I just don't like Mellel. I want to, I really do, but I don't.

it is certainly professionally written and feature rich, and good value for money, but I do not like the way it does things. The way that styles are used and applied is counterintuitive to me, and for a professional writer it has a yawning omission: outlining.

Outlining is not something that gets bolted on to a WP app: it has to be built in from the ground up. Mellel has a vague stab at it with its strange 'document flow' idea but it really doesn't work for me, especially the ass-backwards way you have to enter text into text boxes.

MS Word has many faults, God knows, but it has always had a great outliner which integrates seamlessly with the WP. Text styles change to reflect the outline hierarchy. MS Word's sections are also much more powerful than anything Mellel has to offer.

Like everyone else in the world I balk at paying the sticker price for MS Office, especially when Mellel seems so much cleaner and better integrated into the whole OS X gestalt, but for the heavy duty real-world mission critical stuff i do Mellel currently doesn't cut it.