Have you every tried Scrivener? It can't (and wasn't designed to) replace Word for final edits and layout adjustments, but it a great tool for actually writing. I'm using it now for my thesis and love it. I'll compile and export it to Word to finish it up and fix any endnote citation issues. The biggest thing that held me back was endnote citations, but apparently endnote does work with it.
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Other thing I was thinking about...
Yes, I'm a computer "nerd," and love software and have tried many Office suites. Since I use them so much all day everyday the right choice was important. I never hated Office because: (1) there's no reason to, and (2) I'm an accounting major and will finish my Masters and get my license within 2 years. I will be using Office, Access, and MS Dynamics (among other enterprise system software) all my life. I get a lot of Access and Excel projects in class right now. I tried, I really tried, to do my Excel projects on the Mac version, but it simply didn't have the functionality I needed, it lagged, and it wasn't very compatible.
Well, I loved Pages 09. I used it for everything from letters to research proposals, but my usage has dramatically changed for a few reasons. First, I am using my iPad a lot more now. It's easier to take an iPad and a good keyboard to class than a 15" rMBP. Second, Microsoft finally released Office for iPad, and it was really good. Is it perfect? No. Is it a solid release that has received much support? Yes. The only compatibility issue I've had was with one font that wasn't on my iPad. Third (and last), Apple destroyed iWork. Even before the update, the Mac and iOS version of iWork were NOT very compatible so I gave up on them. With me using the iPad at school I wanted good Mac/iOS communication and OneDrive has worked out great. Why use Pages 09 on Mac and Word on iPad? I've almost completely cut out Pages without even thinking about it. It makes me sad because Pages was an amazingly refined and useful word processor and page layout tool. I have all kinds of pages documents still on my system, but Word was just easier and is the standard. All my professor post material as .docx (why not .pdf, I don't know...). There is also Word and Excel communication in Windows, I haven't tested it in the Mac version. Office is the standard that I will use and it's good. Why not use it? Pages will not be supported and will fade away eventually, Office is here to stay. Office has it's issues and many people dislike it with good reason, but for my usages it fits. I've started using Word for all the small tasks too (if I don't use textedit for really quick things) and Scrivener for big projects that get exported into Word for final edits. I've even grown to enjoy OneNote.
Microsoft has done some amazing work. I just wish that they would function more like a neutral software company and make great products with parity on all platforms. Sadly, the Mac clients will never be what the Windows versions are, which is to be expected (or not surprising I should say.) Now I just use Mac Word for a viewer and some lighter usages and Mac Excel for only the most basic spreadsheets. I use Office 2013 in VMWare for everything else.
Quick side note: When I first moved to Mac, I really tried to like Numbers, I really tried. I used it a lot, but it was just infuriation to use! Simple things were completely absent and even the implementation of what was there was unintuitive.
