Plain text is "powerful" in some ways, but supporting links, styles, a bibliography, and even embedded scripts, in the way Word does, is not a power it has.
There's a growing class of editors that strive to provide a richer document experience while still relying on plain text as the file format. I don't usually suggest normal people adopt it, but an example of this kind of hybrid approach is Orgmode in emacs. I can do ALL SORTS OF THINGS with my org files, but the actual data is still just plaintext with minimal and human-readable markup. The editor does the rest of the work.
I find that promising.
There was an (astute, I think) article from "Joel on Software" years ago saying that the main reason that supporting the Word format was hard was that, by implication, you needed to implement every feature Word had to do it right.
Again, Orgmode is a great example. I can (and sometimes do) use my org files outside of emacs.
a plain-text light-markup file -- easily read, parsed, and rewritten when necessary by a plethora of apps (text-editors, spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, link-checkers, sanitizers, validators, on and on) -- is a big advantage (gargantuan!) over a complex xml-format document stored in a .zip container.
and editing and ease-of-use (and re-use and repurposability) is much friendlier as well.
But you can get pretty far down the road. That's my point.
light-markup will never do everything ms-word does.
nor should it.
but typical light-markup systems these days handle all of the features needed for the vast majority of long-form documents which are now being produced -- books, annual reports, scientific articles, etc. -- and do it with an eye toward mounting on the web.
whereas ms-word is still stuck in a page mentality, and creates .html output which is rather horrendous.
but i agree that ms-word is still valuable to many.
and i no longer feel it necessary to bludgeon word for being the "de facto default" out in the world, where everybody uses it because everybody uses it, and nobody can use anything else because "conform".
so if someone needs one of the "does more" things where ms-word does more, i'm glad they have word. it's a tool in their chest, no reason to begrudge. i'm happy, even, that word has true fans like you.
i'm also glad the rest of us can move on now to something that we think is better. it's about time.
ms-word can support those things as well, but only when you bring its proprietary format into its proprietary, closed-source app, which is not free of cost. the silo only looks better when you are locked inside it.
it's fine to prefer ms-word. prefer whatever you like. but think clearly and fairly if you start to bring up objective comparative advantage.
and i like the simplicity and flexibility and freedom of plain-text as my format of choice. but if you or anybody else prefers something different, i urge you to take that path.