In older office I could move toolbars around. If I could have moved the ribbon to be vertically arranged on the right side (hence my Adobe comments) it would have been at least usable.
My point regarding 16:9 screens stands. Many people would have migrated to cheap 16:9 panels (this was certainly the case for the cheap Dells most of the PhD students in my lab were given). The 97 UI has a lot of unused space To the right where you could drag the lower toolbar and expand as needed. You could also customise it and place your frequently used buttons where you wanted them. I always had super/subscripts in easy reach.
The inflexibility of the ribbon to and the endless clicking about at least helped me move away from Microsoft and embrace *nix.
