The road ahead for OpenOffice

I agree 100% with these arguments, being an active but often frustrated OO user for over 5 years.
Decoupling the document from the vendor suite (with the Open Document format) was a tremendous achievement, but the road ahead for OO does not look so promising:

• Instead of redefining and redesigning an Office suite tailored to user needs it is developing into a pale, MS Office-wannabe sibling. It confuses the (real) user need of a better Office suite with that of an open alternative to MS Office.
• It has most of the same flaws of (older) MS Office with less of its (newer) functionality. The trade off is to its disadvantage, since it's now playing to catch-up with competition that is evolving.
• It is still very buggy in critical areas such as the spell-checker and word count, which were also introduced late as proper features.
• It is not modular, forcing one huge download and installation of the whole suite. I'd like to, in true open market fashion, be able to choose and use the best components from each suite.
• It has a very slow and clumsy release cycle. The early 2.0 beta was an embarrassment.
• It doesn't clean-up properly after an uninstall. There are no excuses for this.
  
• It lacks a much needed auto-update feature. For the average computer user, upgrading a release is a pain.
• Last but not least, it lacks truthful, constructive, and objective criticism -criticism is often regarded as a nod towards Microsoft. Most users and adopters of OO tend to be people that are somewhat partial in their reviews. The views within some parts of the open-source community mix blind, anti-corporate bashing with the open source ideal.
  

I tend to regard the less-than-100% compatibility issue as an overall successful struggle to reverse-engineer a proprietary document format.

As it stands, OO is an alternative to MS Office, which is a good thing to have. In fact, it is the alternative to MS Office.
But mostly for monetary or ideologic reasons, not based on the quality of the offering.