You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.
I think you can turn off that smart selection thing. There is corresponding "smart" behaviour when you drag a selection to a different place so you don't end up with missing or duplicated spaces, so the precise boundary of the selection isn't as important as you think unless you want to select mid-word. I think for most people this behaviour that you find annoying is actually useful - remember that Microsoft is one of the few companies that actually does real user testing.
For your other objection (and maybe what you were also really getting at with your selection objection), maybe you'd like WordPerfect 5.1's "reveal codes"? :-) We can all agree that Microsoft wouldn't have hesitated to steal that feature if it would have benefitted them. The fact that they didn't is proof that formatting markup is something that was historically tried (or considered) and rejected, rather than something waiting to happen in the future.
In any case, for a program as huge as Microsoft Word, I think this is all quite minor. How much of your day is really ruined if you start typing after some bold text, find that the new text is bold when you didn't want it to be, and have to manually turn it off again? It's a fundamental problem with the model, like you said, but has surprisingly tiny impact on usability. If this is your biggest objection, it's almost proof that the program is pretty good. (But I can sympathise with minor objections: I hate copy and paste works differently in Excel then any other program!)
If I have an income of $250k/yr and a pack of peanuts costs $2 or very roughly 0.001% of my annual income, the equivalent peanut money for ~$130 billion a year microsoft would be more like $2 million.
I find DeepSeek flash incredible for the price and good in general if it has good plans. I will typically plan using Opus or GLM, then implement with DSF
Apple often plays a game where they blend security and business interests, but represent it only as a security interest.
They own the OS and could do for private relay like what they do for screen recording: when it's in use, overlay an unhideable visual indicator that it's that it's in use. Make it visually obvious when it turns off.
> There's no organized political movement trying to tell people that seat belts and speed limits are immoral
I rode in a lot of cars when I lived in Eastern Ukraine, 9/10 times or more the seatbelts had been removed or tucked behind the seats and not intended to be used. I got some very funny/annoyed looks when I first arrived and dug around in seats looking for a belt.
There's no need for a political movement when you already have the thing (no seatbelts).
>Write markdown
You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.