I don't know why everybody thinks Microsoft Word doesn't have Reveal Codes. They have it; it's called Reveal Formatting; it has mostly been there since version 1.0 which I remember installing from 100 floppy disks in college in 1989.
Wordperfect's "Show Codes" tells you every attribute and layout change inline.
For example, if bolded some text, Word would just bold it. Wordperfect would insert a symbol like [bold] and the text would be plain, instead of rendering it. Removing the code symbol would change the attribute from the text. This allowed you do to format documents for printing on a system that couldn't handle displaying them fully formatted interactively.
This isn't a great response, I know. It's just a data point for the theory that Word and WordPerfect are comparable in this respect.
(This is going back so long ago now. I was still at school! Maybe the problem was that you still had to interact with the GUI view to fix things? So you could still end up with the usual weird Word stuff, but no way to fix it, because you couldn't get right in there and just manually shuffle the codes around like you could with WP.)