> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...

Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.