[colanderman]

> I guess my contention is that we all should realize a giant program like word is going to exhibit areas of latency that simpler programs can be more efficient in.

But that's just lazy design. The immediate effect of typing a character (i.e., showing up on screen) hasn't changed in decades. Yes Word may do other stuff, but none of that other stuff is in the critical path for typing latency.

Think of a database like Oracle. Oracle does lots of stuff, but its critical latency path (committing simple transactions to the log) is as fast or faster than "simpler" ACID databases.