Don't sweat the Word thing too much. That's just Jon's personal little crusade. He wants to be able to take apart everyone's epubs and have perfect code waiting for him.
As long as you save it (from word) as filtered html you should be alright. Word does have a tendency to add a lot of unnecessary crap to the HTML, but it's not hard to clean it up manually. If you're used to Word... use Word. No need to reinvent the wheel if you're not so inclined.
