[Libreoffice] Directions?

Hello List,

This is my first post.... following on somewhat from a previous message re
being in a big town with no map :

Apologies in advance if I should be posting this to another listing :)

I'm a software engineer by day, have been for 12+ years  :-O , working with
large projects involving hundreds of others, so I'm comfortable with complex
codebases and strict version controls.

But the project tree that is LibreOffice really takes the biscuit... (and a
nice one too)

My wife collaborates extensively with her peers on many academic papers, and
they rely heavily on the Comments feature of MS Word.  This is stopping her
from taking up OOo/LibO - the Notes functionality of Write doesn't seem to
retain the formatting of her colleagues' annotations via MS Word, only to
mess them up for everyone - this had cost her a good number of hours and
even more strands of hair.

I'm very keen to dive in and sort that out - but for the life of me I cannot
find what converts Comments in a .doc file into Notes of Writer/Text, and
obviously the vice versa too.  Can some kind soul here point me to the
file(s) of relevance to start me off on my dry running, and whom should I be
talking to to get changes in?  Thanks!

And on a related note - as I begin to find my way around (hopefully!) - I'd
like to start adding directions to a map of the code for others like me, but
where/how/ideas?  Thanks again!

Andy