Ribbon was better for most people who didn't have all the shortcuts in muscle memory. It is much more discoverable.
Also traditional menus had some traditional standards. Once you learned what was under "File" or "View" or "Insert" or "Format" it was often pretty similar across applications.
There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.
The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.
Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.
The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.
When the accursed ribbon came along, "discoverability" went out the window. Functions were grouped according to some strange MS logic I could never understand, and it takes me twice as long to format a page as it used to. Now, I basically just use Word for text entry, and if I want an elegant format, I use a graphic design app like Illustrator.
Judging from what I've read online, you may be the only person who actually likes the ribbon.
CUA ~= "standard menus + keyboard shortcuts for dos and windows": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
I was hoping to figure out what led to design incompetence so spectacular that people would still be discussing it after 17 years.
I think there’s a clue in the abstract: The author claims they made 25,000 mock UI screenshots, but doesn’t mention user studies or even internally prototyping some of the concepts to see how they feel.
It wouldn’t be so bad if keyboard navigation was as good as with the classic menus, but having to press the Alt key separately, and general increased latency, kills it.