I agree beautiful defaults help LaTeX, all the more so because I always use someone else's well defined template. But, my main issues with Docs/Word is not just "look", rather:

- smart figure/caption/table handling (no orphaned captions, no figures hanging out in the middle of the page) - easy, label-based cross referencing (not selecting each from a popup interface) - text-based equation input

All that being said, I still have an elaborate Word template I use for proposal writing. Because often I have to pass it off to others (who may not know TeX) to contribute, and sometimes I need to quickly bastardize my nice formatting to squeeze into hard page limits.

ShareLatex / Overleaf is very good, but I'd love to see slightly more ease of use as OP suggests. I'd like to see a switchable WYSIWYG / code editor, so laypeople can make simple formatting changes visually without needing to know the right commands, and it propagates correctly into the underlying LaTeX.