Publishing? Are you sure? I know people who do book layouts, and they're all using InDesign, which is a completely different tool.

For real publishing, I think TeX is still the state-of-the-art. It still produces the best-looking documents put on paper (granted, one needs to give it a decent font to do so…).

Pity that it's so difficult to do, say, bilingual books with one language on one side and the other on the other, with page elements lined up neatly. For that, Word is probably the easiest — but it looks terrible.

"Obscure" does not mean "useless". I wager that most of Word's features are not used by the majority of its users, and are difficult to find in menus if you don't know what you're looking for. They are then, by definition, obscure.