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Fact remains, despite all the hard work that has gone into LibreOffice, it remains a major step down

Depends in what.

You may have a point regarding Excel vs LibreOffice Calc especially for large and complex spreadsheets. Microsoft knows exactly what is keeping most businesses from migrating - it is the beancounter (especially the one with a joke MBA) and his precious planning spreadshet with the magic formulae which has had zero testing, zero documentation and is something any software engineer would be fired for. It has optimized excel over the years and this shows till this day when you try to run excel and calc side by side (especially with abominable input).

You really need to have your brain examined if you are trying to make the same point about other functionality. For example, let's take the Microsoft formula editor vs its LibreOffice equivalent. LibreOffice has stolen a lot from (La)TeX in that area and is several light years ahead of MSFT which cannot even get a trivial equation with a sum and 2 indexes right.

Same goes for structured and disciplined document writing support - both Word vs Writer and PowerPoint vs Impress. Microsoft till this day cannot get global document style information right - it breaks the moment it moves from one machine to another. That is also one of the reasons most people who use predominately Orifice never learn to use an editor the way it should be used in a business setting - "live by the template, die by the template"· They continuously format by hand using the fonts menu which breaks even further as a document moves between people.

I can continue the second list ad naseum, but all in all - unless you have excel vs calc in mind, I beg to differ.