[Pinkie]

Edited to amend the version. I'm actually using 5, not 4.4!
Well, I gave it a great try. I worked really hard at it, because the reviews are stellar. But LibreOffice just doesn't cut it as a word processor. The Track Changes are much improved, and I might use it to edit, but nothing else.
I used it to write a novella from scratch, so no "taint" from another program. I used more than one computer to write it, because I was on the road for part of the time. So it's not the computer, it's not bringing over unwanted elements from another program.
I was a Word writer for many years, but I don't want to rent my software, and the outright price is prohibitive, so now my 2010 subscription is running out, I need to find another way. I know my way around computers and various word processing programs.

Here's why I can't take it any more.
1. Capitalization. It's truly horrible. If you start a sentence with a contraction, like I'm or Don't, it doesn't capitalize the word. The only way around it is to type the first letters before the apostrophe, backspace and then type the rest. Nope. Not doing that through a manuscript. I tried writing a macro to alter the behavior. More about macros below. Yes, I know I can use the shift key, and if it was that alone, I could cope with that. But it's not.
2. Capitalization part two. If you start a sentence with double quotes, ie dialogue, then it doesn't capitalize the first word. Okay, I can handle that, Word doesn't do that either, but the macro I wrote in Word is rock solid, and I can clear that up with the press of a button. That doesn't work in LO. If you end a sentence with a quote, and put the punctuation inside the quote, it doesn't capitalize the first letter of the next sentence.
3. Styles. LO arbitrarily changes Styles through a document, and language, if you use more than one language. I write some novels in UK English and others in US English. I set a style for the main body of text, and later on in the page find that I've somehow transitioned to a new style that I didn't want. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for this, and I can't change it, though I've tried, including trying to restrict a document to a limited range of styles. Nope, it doesn't like that.
4. Macros. I have a big set of macros that I wrote in Word. I'd have to rewrite all of them for LO. Kill me now. I tried, wrote a few and they worked fine. Then I closed the document, went back to it the next day, and they didn't work any more, or worked erratically. If I could get the macros to behave, I could get LO Writer to behave the way I want it to, but I'm tired of writing the same macro numerous times, only to have it fail the next time I open the document. There is no way to import the Word macros I've built. I did, reluctantly, install JRE, but that didn't make any difference. They still didn't work.

That's why.
If anybody has any suggestions that don't include me breaking my work flow to learn new habits, like the backspace thing, please let me know. There have been so many great reviews of this software, that I don't know what is going wrong here. Or is this usual for LO?
At the moment, I'm thinking of Scrivener, just for the word processor (I don't like the bells and whistles they provide as well, I use OneNote for most of that), or SoftMaker. Any more ideas? I don't ask for much, just a word processor that works properly, and is compatible with Word which is industry standard.