You, in the Mac world, are experiencing what many of us ran into about 10 years ago with the introduction of Word 2007.

If you still have an earlier version available, you can create new toolbars with one command per button. Then, use that.

Otherwise, it is possible to create custom tabs and to add things to the QAT. To get the flexibility of the old toolbars, though, requires XML modification (not through the Word interface). See Customize the Ribbon (It doesn't take rocket science). A useful resource is RibbonX: Customizing the Office 2007 Ribbon by Robert Martin, Ken Puls, and Teresa Hennig.

You may be able, instead, to do QAT modifications that access your macros. See Modifying the QAT in Microsoft Word. Such modifications do not include menus that are not already on a ribbon tab, but are much simpler to do than are XML modifications.