> to be honest as a LaTeX user on a very beefy CPU I regularly have 30s+ of build times for larger documents.
A lot of the time folks are sitting and thinking and things are idle. Perhaps Word could 'reflow' text in the background (at least the parts that are off screen)? Also, maybe the saved .docx could perhaps have hints so that on loading things don't have be recalculated?
Oh dear lord, the last thing I ever wanted Word to do was to try and reflow things. I can't be the only person that tried to move an image only to have it somehow disappear into the ether while Word tried to flow around it. :D