All major releases of Microsoft Office are managed by marketing, as
all major releases of proprietary software and hardware companies, and
not by developers, and are based on what you call "marketing tricks".
By the way, marketing is a profession - as development - which is
based on a specific professional background, and on a mindset which is
100% different from the mindset of a developer.
This is probably the reason why developers, and in general people with
a strong technical background, do not understand marketing and
consider it useless. Marketing is the opposite of science, and is
based on behaviour analisys (which is the "least scientific" science,
although some people are trying to "smuggle" it as science).
I have been a marketing executive for the last 42 years (since 1981),
and the best marketing strategies I have managed during that time have
been based on gut feelings (including the launch of Photoshop and PDF,
when I was a marketing consultant for Adobe, and they both were huge
success).
Given that Microsoft Office's market share is well over 50%, it looks
like users of office suites do like marketing tricks. Please remember
that around 98% of users are not able to judge features.
I am not contributing to QA for a very simple reason: I am not able to
understand if the software behaviour is right or wrong (unless is
clear as in the case of font embedding in macOS), and this is because
I am not interested in technical details but I look at the wider picture.
Even if I am technically illiterate, outside the open source
environment I am considered a geek because I usually am more competent
than 98% of "normal" software users.
It should be clear that 80% (and probably more) of what we communicate
is targeted to "normal" software users, and not to community members
or to people with a technical background, who are already using
LibreOffice (or refuse to use it for technical reasons). They are not
our target, given that office suites are commodities.
Our target is mis-informed and mis-educated by Microsoft, but doesn't
realize it. On the contrary, they trust Microsoft more than they trust
open source software.