Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
This and the hidden ribbons completely ruin the thing for me. But I do tend to like megamenus on other applications, so the problem is probably office, not the ribbons.
Why is insert cross reference smaller than inserting a bookmark or hyperlink?
Who knows!
There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago).
So we have:
* Is actually no worse than the existing solution.
* Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution.
Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
I never used Word until recently, or any wysiwyg Word processor really.
The ribbon is just confusing. It so happens many of the functions I use are not surfaced, so I have to remember which tiny expando angle to click and that a function I use often is demoted in a ribbon to a smaller icon.
It is pain. Some functions are more visible and surfaced at the expense of added friction in the others. Which functions are surfaced is guess work and statistics. Outliers suffer.
The old menu styles made each function roughly equal in their level.
I could customise the ribbon, but then when I Google how to do something, my menus don't match the examples!
Madness
The ribbon is nothing more than a menu laid out in a grid, rather than a list.
The tool I'm referring to is the search box. It should be on the window chrome, alongside the ribbon tabs. You can find verification of that claim in your copy of Word, or basically any screenshot of it. The source is that it exists.
Hum... Yes. That's probably a major reason why it's harder to search.
The ribbon, on the other hand, reads like someone took all the icons off the toolbars, shook them up in a toybox full of other junk and clutter, and dumped it all out into a messy pile. Randomly sized icons, arrow menus, tabs, just scattered haphazardly all over.
There's no way that can be considered 'strictly superior' to a clean, straightforward, well-organized UI.