Have you experienced the styles system? For everyday docs (letters, notes, …), writing such simple documents is a treat with styles. It is even faster than direct-formatting.
I am no developer. I’ve chosen LO Writer precisely for its ease of use. The templates provide another layer of ease of use: pre-formatted documents customised for your own usage. This requires some preparation ahead of it, but the “return over investment” is worth it.
Regarding the trade-off between direct formatting vs. styling, I consider the cut-off point to be at 2 pages for one-shot documents and 1 page (yes!) for maintained documents, i.e. documents you’d edit and revise several times.
And like most users, most of my documents are ~5 pages long.