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You did each line of the entire book by hand?
Surely you could have used one find and replace to remove the tabs (either in AbiWord or OpenOffice, or in the output file). And you could use styles to indent/de-indent paragraphs. How hard this would be would depend on whether the .doc file used styles, or there is some other easy way for a computer to determine which lines should be indented and which not. (I didn't really understand what you meant by lines of dialogue nor why they should be treated differently than other paragraphs.) If so, it should have been possible to do it in either one easily enough.
Actually despite my signature, I don't use either OpenOffice or Abiword that much, except to convert things. I generally prefer just to edit mark-up code (either LaTeX or HTML) in a text editor. How easy it would be to make global changes to a document after conversion really depends on how messy the source document was to begin with. Word documents are often messy, and HTML exported from Word a nightmare. Certainly, HTML exported from AbiWord is cleaner and easier to work with. But if the source Word document was a mess (which they often are, since Word encourages sloppy habits), there's not much you can do except a lot of manual editing.
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