Last time I used Word for anything significant (a thesis) it was either word 2003 or 2007, and adding a table or inserting a new paragraph somewhere before a figure could mess up all the figure placement (sometimes the thing would literally disappear).
After that I switched to LaTeX and never looked back. Has this recently become better, or was I just unlucky/unexperienced?
Well, this is exactly what I don’t want to do in a wyswyg editor, but glad that it worked out for you
Previous documents ive written with word i would do things like tight layouts on images, maybe with anchors, but that's a recipe for things moving around.
When i came to compile my chapters to a final document i used master document-subdocument to pull everything together. I only had a few issues with blank pages being added when exporting to pdf and that was due to my use of page breaks and section breaks.
Ah, so the solution is to use Word as if it was a worse LaTeX, I see :^)
Jokes aside, the precise manual positioning of figures and such (e.g. figures at a certain height of a paragraph, with text flowing around it) was the only potential attractiveness of Word.
If that’s still broken I really don’t see the reason for switching to a program with worse typesetting (and not only) capabilities, given my use case and the fact that I’m quite comfortable with LaTeX by now
You should try TeXmacs; it is not recent, but it has become smooth and it is superior to both LaTeX and Word under every point of view.