Fair point. I supposed they didn't promise anything. However, they have made attempts with each version to a) make the UI development more stable (Office 2007) and then b) more accessible (Office 2010).

Anyone who did heavy development work with the commandbars object model in versions of office prior to 2007 understands why they threw the whole thing out and started over with the xml-based Fluent UI.

And I assume they are utilizing some kind of similar schema to what they exposed, except that they turn off certain "features" they have access to because of memory issues (i.e., they have the opportunity to optimize trouble-some bits of UI code within the winword kernel that may cause some things to come to a grinding halt if they allowed the entire world to develop in the same parameters).

It just seems kind of a big miss to disallow some of the functions illustrated in this very simple exercise (re-creating the font group in Word 2010).

In particular, the work-around for being able to have .BeginGroup = True on *any* control rather than just controls not within a sub-structure seems particularly egregious.

And I respectfully disagree that they don't see the ribbon as a programmable component. I think they are always edging towards exposing more... but with the limitation that they need to make sure Word is stable first, and modifiable second.

I just can't believe that allowing separators within boxes is something they disallowed in the "save them from themselves" bailiwick. I think that's a simple mistake.

If I understood XML schema better, I suspect I could somehow tell my XML code *not* to check in with the /office/2009/07/customui schema, and it would probably work... I'm just not quite sure yet how to do that.