OpenOffice is not awful. It might not be as "polished" as Word is, but to be honest, I think people look for reliability and practicality, not speed or aesthetics. Besides, NeoOffice works great on my computer, so your theories on speed is debunked.
Now, go sulk in your own corner.
Reliability and practucality are exactly the reasons OpenOffice sucks.
I remember using it two years ago on my Linux machine. That piece of crap corrupted the documents when saving them about one time out of 8. Saving in its native format, by the way. Not to .doc or anything fancy like that. In the end of the day, MS Office 2000 running under WINE was more reliable. If OpenOffice never corrupted anything for you - great. I have lost hours and hours of work myself.
More recent versions I have been unfortunate enough to use under Windows did save files fine. But they crashed - much more often than MS office ever did for me, and much more often than I would consider to be 'practical'. OO would also grind to a halt if presented with any document containing many tables and/or pictures. Granted, MS Office does that too - but it takes many more tables and pictures to bring MS Office down to its knees.
OpenOffice does not support neither MS Office templates, nor LaTeX style sets. Ever tried submitting a paper to any major scientific journal? No, you won't be able to make it with OpenOffice. Ever.
How about reference management? Say, you are writing a paper with 150 references, which you need formatted in a certain way, and cross-referenced throughout the 40 pages of text itself? Don't have any illusions. You cannot accomplish that simply with OpnOffice. Yes, you can export the paper in RTF, and scan it with something like EndNote or Bookends... But it is a crappy solution compared to, say, a typical MS Office/Endnote or Mellel/Bookends combination.
Did I mention OpenOffice is slow and bloated? On slower/cheaper computers, and I am talking Pentium 4 2.4GHz/512M of RAM, it takes literally forever to start up. I don't care why, or how. It just sucks to wait 40 seconds for that awful word processor to load into the memory.
As far as your experience with NeoOffice goes - good for you. If you can tolerate it, and do whatever work you need to be done with it - go ahead and save yourself a few bucks. However, if you are content with the level of functionality in OpenOffice, you should be aware that there are other free programs that do the same - and they are BETTER. For example, AbiWord is way better than OpenOffice writer. Gnumeric is way better than OpenOffice spreadhseet. And I can go on.
As for myself, I use Mellel/Bookends, Keynote, and Deltagraph myself. I am by no means an MS Office apologist. But most of the overly positive OpenOffice posts on Slashdot, here, and elsewhere irk me immensely. "Why don't you use OpenOffice? It's Free Software and it is insanely great!!!eleventy111!!!"
It is bad software in need of a from-scratch rewrite. Sorry, it is a hard truth. And until people heading that project will realize that, MS will have a virtual monopoly on office suite market - just because their product is that much better than the competition.
