“The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing.”

100% agree with that. But your proposed substitute is nonsense on stilts. Markdown? Please. WYSIWYG exists for a reason.

LibreOffice’s problem is that it’s playing Microsoft Office’s game by Microsoft Office’s rules. That is a game it cannot win. Microsoft Office succeeds not by being good at what it does but by being a massive monolith that no-one else can match. Those who try to replicate it only work themselves to death trying to do so. That’s a fools’ game.

Instead of trying to build a better Office, look at what users try to/actually do with it and target that. For starters, a lot of people use Excel not as a programmable parallel calculator (spreadsheet) but as a tabular layout tool for ad-hoc/databaseable information. So build a grid layout tool that is entirely agnostic on programmability and back-end storage, and allow different components to plug in as needed.

I’m always leery of pointing to component architectures like OpenDoc as those are a whole ’nother honeytrap in themselves, but Unix Philosophy posited that lots of small, simple, highly focused, and freely pluggable tools would scale better to solving users’ problems than the vast impenetrable monolithic architectures of Office et al. Unix/Linux may have failed to pay its own philosophy more than lip service (I mean, how many features is `ls` up to now? 50? 100?), but whereas MS Office is also mired in its own market success it’s never too late for the also-rans to rethink their losers’ game and rewrite its rules to be one they can win. They just have to want to change, and try something that hasn’t been tried.

And yes, change means risk and potential for [greater] failure. But just look at Steve Jobs: he never beat Microsoft by building a better PC; he did it by radically redefining what “Personal Computing” means, inventing a completely new market of Personal Computing users, and being first to that market with the right product to sell them.

So, no, an Office suite that runs in a web browser is not the sort of thing I’m talking about either. Although the web should, as you say, provide the foundation for a modern data editing and sharing system. But look at what people actually do today with “Office” software, regardless of whether it’s what that software was designed to do or not, and from there pinch off one well-defined use-case at a time and reformulate it in terms of basic reusable components joined together with some task-specific glue, then push that to that market as a tool just for them that does what they need done so much quicker, easier, and safer than anything else.

(Ironically, the web originally conceived as a fully read-write platform where everyone could read and everyone could write, and it was only Berners-Lee’s corner-cutting impatience that recast it as a read-only platform with its editing keys jealously kept by a new high priesthood of “Web Developers”.)

--

TL;DR: Let’s build a better “Office Suite” is the wrong game to play. “Let’s identify solve individual specific real-world problems that users actually have today”, and just happen to build those solutions in a way that keeps everything small, agile, flexible, and humble; instead of bloating into the traditional Big Ball of Mud that is wonderful for developer egos and customer lock-in and absolutely awful for anything else.