> Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now

It also breaks regularly. I know a student in the middle of a thesis writing up marathon, and the time he wastes with this is unbelievable. For example, there are the references that just end up garbled, with Word putting in an error message instead, the references that somehow don't get updated despite having been entered exactly like all the others that do. It adds at least two passes every time he wants to send a chapter to proofread.

Tables in LaTeX are bad. References, notes, and bibliography in Word are horrendous.

I meant it more in terms of bad figure placement. LaTeX tries to place the figure relatively close to the source, it has a sane fallback policy, like grouping them together at the end of the section.

With word one can get from a decently formatted text to multiple quarter-filled pages with a single additional sentence, because it has comparatively bad algorithm for text-block reflow.

I've written two thesis in Latex and a small 100 page book in Word.

Word 2000 performed wonderfully. I had no problems with references or images shifting around, no strange errors, nothing. Bibliography sucked, but in general it was a pleasure to work with.

Word 365, on the other hand, is something I have to force to do what I want again and again. It is built in such a way that doing things cleanly and error-free is difficult and much less obvious than in Word 2000. Even standard tools like image anchors, which worked nicely in 2k, are not reliable anymore. I got the feeling that this is due to automatisms aimed at casual users.

Among fellow students countless hours were lost playing with spaces, line breaks, font sizes just to get tables/figures stay or move to the next page. This did look like an endless task: adding few chars in a chapter could have messed up positioning of bunch of figs.