Should I be making the case for document stability?

[Ulodesk]

I would like to invite anyone with experience who cares to, to weigh in on the following issue.
I see an erosion of DTP standards proceeding at my workplace, despite my years of efforts to institute proper practices with respect to styles, breaks, etc., for document stability. I deal with corporate proposal documents. While I recognize that Word is now more stable than it was in the 2003 days, I prefer to “err” on the side of caution and best practice rather than accept the argument, “Well, the document is holding up so far,” or “Well, we did this in another document and it was fine…”
Examples include local deletion of numbers in auto-numbered headings (that is, in some of them) so as to type out-of-sequence numbers in their place; bringing in whole documents from other custom (or utterly wild Normal) templates, thus increasing the styles list from around 60 custom corporate styles to 200 or more, ending up with, for instance, two sets of numbered headings, several “Body text” styles, and, of course, numerous styles that have blended into monsters like “NExhibitCaption,ec,KExhibitCap,KExhibit ActionCap,KExhibit Caption,kea_ec” along with the inevitable “char”s from older documents, and so forth.
From my nearly ten years of corporate proposal experience, and everything I have read, this is Russian roulette, with the proverbial filled chamber just waiting to fall into place in a 350-page document 1 hour before the deadline for the document to go to print, throwing numbering off, altering point-sizes, and any number of other surprises I have witnessed more than once in years past.
Aesthetics aside for the moment, however, perhaps I am out of date with Word’s stability upgrades, stability constituting my primary concern and argument. If I shouldn’t be worrying about it, so much the better.
I would be grateful for any MVPs and knowledgeable others to offer their views on this matter.


Thanks.