Microsoft and its struggles with releasing new Office

As part of my role, I am exploring latest offerings including from vendors like Microsoft. As part of the Copilot trials, I ended up needing to use the latest MS Office apps. Most of these new applications are now just web-based app on the desktop. So far most of the time, I am finding out that features are removed from MS Office suite of products to match the limited set of web-based application features (and the features that are added are either not fully baked or the users do not know how to use them - so basically, they do not add value).All my trial users bailed on new MS Outlook in under 24 hours. These users are serious power users (mailbox sizes in excess of 80-90GB). So, for them some of the features like inability to customize views is not acceptable. Second obvious problem is lag. Most of these users are used to working via local cache, now suddenly, everything is sluggish, slower - because everything is coming down from closest Azure Datacenter. If we see sluggishness on a dedicated corporate fiber in Southern California, I really don't want to be a user with network latency >5 msec in India. In all fairness, Microsoft does offer a way to just toggle back to the older Outlook, but then the fully prepaid Copilot licenses are not useful. So far, Copilot looks promising with PowerPoint, really good with Excel, alright with Word and "I don't know what this is doing" - with Outlook. Jury is still out for MS Teams. It's basically hit or miss. Document sizes that Copilot can consume and stay sane is limited (less than 20 pages, give or take). Marketing and Sales types can use it because they are used to dealing with fuzzy imprecise roundabout ways of language. I am pretty sure that legal and engineering teams will have hissy fit over "not coming to the point" part. I suspect the new Office is about 1-2 years away from the regular release. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

(Oh, and don't even think about looking for help on Microsoft.com - most of time the help is not applicable to whatever version you would have)