Personal opinion: the tabbed interface is some “pollution” requested by M$ lore afficionados who don’t make the mental effort to learn the principles of a new application. The tabbed interface is not a “neater” one, it is one which forwards the “bad” (once again personal opinion) concepts implemented in M$ Word.
Writer is style-oriented. Styles are a way to markup your document as to the significance of paragraphs, words, pages, … intended by you as the author. You then associate this significance with visual or typographical attributes, not the other way round (for instance, you can have a “foreign” and an “irony” styles for foreign language words or ironical sequences which both are rendered italics; if you style first, you can make a distinction when you edit your document but if you set italics first, you can no longer revise automatically the foreign words without changing also the irony!).
When you are fully “style-writing”, you no longer need the formatting buttons for bold, italics, numbered lists, font face, … You only apply the styles from the various menus, lists (Navigator) or keyboard shortcuts (for styles, not for effects).
Therefore, I always remain with the standard UI which anyway I seldom use because I play with styles.
