but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place
We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.
IMO the issue is more with the document format than what people are doing with it. The most recurrent problem I've seen was with text that was deleted at some point appearing instead of the current version.
What I'd really want in the first place is people to care if what they are sharing is in the right format.
When a non technical clients asks a designer to see some early drafts of a site's UI, they will usually receive rendered jpg or png files, not Photoshop or Illustrator files. Most school teachers would be pissed of if students were to turn in home assignments in tex. I find it inconsiderate to send me docx files for documents that are read only on my side, just send me the PDF instead.
We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.