[DiapDealer]

I don't understand what you're saying with regard to editors and "bugs." Word doesn't create the wrong-facing closing quote you refer to, to my knowledge. Are you creating (meaning typing) texts of your own (with Word) that have this particular issue, or are you opening/editing existing texts that someone else created that are already messed up?

As to why the smartening algorithm hasn't been re-written, I suspect it's because not a lot of people use it (not for creation anyway). Most documents of any quality are created with proper typographic quotes from the very beginning. They're not created with straight quotes and then handed to an algorithm for bulk conversion later.

As for backlist titles that are scanned and slammed to market, I suspect the publisher probably believes the smartening algorithm to be "close enough."

Automagically "smartening" punctuation later will probably always be a bit of an imperfect hack.