My recent experience using Word shown that it was unable to stay out of the way even to create the dumbest possible document such as a presentation outline only made of titles and bullet lists.

I wonder if anybody in Redmond has already figured out that they could kill 90% of the 'features' present in Word without anyone noticing? In fact, the only change to Word people would notice is a facelift to get the remaining 10% right! And I'm not even going to start about how badly Office.X behaves compared to any other Mac application I've ever seen...

Looking at the awful visual bloat of the upcoming Vista catastrophe, I think it's safe to say that the situation is hopeless...

Now which software to use to produce printed material when a professional desktop publishing application is overkill?

I gave a shot to Pages but it's not yet as impressive as Keynote and a bit too presentation-driven. I prefer tools that focus on structure instead.

For the average document to be read on screen or for which the quality of the printed output doesn't really matter, NVU seems like a good option but HTML and custom print CSS are a bit too light for any serious printed material.

Maybe should I get back to my post-teenage love LyX which used to be my main authoring environment back in my CS student (and UNIX geek) days... damn, I can't believe I was such an hardliner that I was using OpenLook at that time!