[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Should formatting apply to word at cursor position or only characters typed after formatting was invoked

Hei everyone!

A while ago I filed a bug report and I had to realize that I am looking 
at a design choice here.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=46517

Basically, when the cursor resides in a word (after first or in front of 
the last character of the word), all formats apply to the whole word. I 
never realized this, until I started using subscript and superscript a 
lot in my writing (for chemical names like CO2).

Is it feasible to change this behavior to formats only being applied to 
newly typed characters?
It seems strange to me, that the whole word is affected, since it is 
something from the past, in contrast to typing new characters in the 
future after invoking formatting (like super-/subscript).
If a whole word has to be formatted, it can easily be marked by double 
clicking it. This also makes more sense to me, since I thereby actively 
tell LibreOffice, that I want the whole word to be affected.
For clarification, I am arguing for the logic behind the formatting 
behavior, not for a reduction in mouse clicks to perform a certain task.

This also seems to be the default behavior in MS Office 2010. Only newly 
typed characters are affected by formatting in Word and Excel.
(And yes, I deserve a beating for using MS Office in my favor, even 
though I shout out my animosity against it whenever I can ;-)

Greetings,
Daniel M