I'll have to take your word for it that it's gotten better. I try to minimize my exposure to Office as much as possible.
I used to think Excel was the one exception to Office being awful until I was assigned a project creating an app in Excel using VBA and found out how incredibly fragile Excel is. This was about 6 years ago.
However, I don't think anyone thinks Office is bad because it has stuff they don't use, but that the stuff they do use either doesn't work well (e.g., Outlook) or it's too hard to use (e.g., Word).
Oh yeah, this is generally where I'd say things start to fall over. A development platform, it ain't. Generally my advice around VBA is that if you're at the stage you need anything but the simplest VBA, you probably want something else (Access for DB style work or Python/R for data munging).
Outlook has got much better - most of the previous issues around lockups and poor performance have improved if not gone away entirely. Can't speak for Exchange.
I used to think Excel was the one exception to Office being awful until I was assigned a project creating an app in Excel using VBA and found out how incredibly fragile Excel is. This was about 6 years ago.
However, I don't think anyone thinks Office is bad because it has stuff they don't use, but that the stuff they do use either doesn't work well (e.g., Outlook) or it's too hard to use (e.g., Word).