The ribbon is about as "front and centre" as you can get for an app, so I can't read your analogy in any way that makes sense to me.

Look. Context menus are useful but lots of people don't find them. In fact, MS added something to apps such as Outlook that addresses your comment about commands being near to the content that they work on, but presents the UI in a more discoverable form. Not sure what it's called, but it's a popup toolbar that fades into view next to your text selection, allowing access to text styling such as bold, italic, etc.

I find that in practice, I know where these commands are on the ribbon - they never move - and have no problem moving the mouse pointer to there, to click them. So, I tend not to use the contextual popup.

For nearness and discoverability, perhaps MS could try this UI again with Explorer and see if people liked it.