I can certainly understand your frustration. We do have workarounds that will allow you to use the Format Paper feature with Word 2016 in the meantime:
Our Technical Support Team would be happy to assist you with this process or if you are having trouble installing the update to X7.4:
The Final version of Word 2016 for Mac was released in early July:
https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/09/office-2016-for-mac-is-here/
Our plan is to have the free update available by September/October, which would be less than 10 months. At this time, some of those other applications you mentioned do not have a plug-in for Word 2016 yet.