Did the same back in the day with OpenOffice. MS Word would crash ad-hoc past a certain page count plus the auto-indexing feature of OO actually worked and was predictable. Also.. the styling was, if clunky, at least workable! Actually think the later versions of LibreOffice have started going down hill, heavier (initially the libre fork prided itself on being light-weight afair) and still as ugly as ever.
A faculty not allowing LaTeX seems like a weird choice, what were their reasons? Did they need direct access to a document for editing or something? Would honestly be a huge red flag for me if someone would tell me in which editor I cannot write a doc.