There are literally hundreds of reasons that the ribbon is superior to menus. Perhaps many of those reasons don't apply to you, or you are simply stubborn and don't want to learn something new. There are of course reasons why the menus are better than ribbons, but too many people act like it's all or nothing... That either Ribbons are better or menus are better, for everyone. Period. What's worse, most people argue reasons that aren't even true, like there being no keyboard shortcuts or that they're different keyboard shortcuts than they used to be. Or that the ribbon takes up more space (which it doesn't, especially if you auto-hide it)
I would be inclined to agree with your argument (well, not the "hundreds of reasons" part), if not for the fact that Office 2007 does not give users the choice. Any user interface programmer knows it would be trivially easy to allow switching between the ribbon and a menu bar. But Microsoft has deliberately kept that capability out. There used to be a Knowledge Base article that flat-out stated "you can't switch from the ribbon to a menu bar, and we did it that way on purpose." But I can't find the article anymore.
A good user interface satisfies all (major) user groups. It's usually not that difficult.
But, here's a few examples.
Menus are hard for people without fine motor control to use. If you are old, disabled, or simply not very well coordinated, ribbons will be much easier to use than trying to make your mouse follow the narrow paths that make submenus show up.
You have heard of the mile high menu bar, yes? It's true larger buttons are better than smaller buttons, especially for people with impaired motor skills. This actually suggests not that ribbons are easier to use than menus, but that they are easier to use than the tiny little toolbar buttons on the vast sea of Office toolbars.
The menus have become monstrous, with more and more features being added to apps, it's harder and harder to find the items you're looking for. The ribbon allows better organization, and "context sensitivity".
Yeah. That's not the fault of menus, that's the fault of the designers' inability to effectively organize the functions of the application. Rather than spend the effort to actually organize things, they tried "Personalized menus" (the visual equivalent of sweeping things under the rug) and when that failed, well, we got ribbons.
The ribbon is far more intuitive to new users.
The ribbon scales to your screen, making buttons smaller if you have less room and changing various other sizes.
I haven't seen any evidence, or even anecdotes, that suggests it's more intuitive. What I have seen is a few decades of accumulated observations that report that a consistent and stable user interface is crucial. Users can't build a pattern of behavior, much less muscle memory, if the controls are moving around all the time. It's like trying to become a touch-typist when the keyboard wants to rearrange itself based on the words you've recently entered.
I have also seen a few decades of accumulated observations that users should be able to list or otherwise examine all of the functionality available to them. That's why it's better to disable or gray out controls than to remove them. The user can't try out a function if he doesn't know it exists because he never saw it in passing while navigating for other functions.
In fact, it's counterintuitive, because it's trying to second-guess the user's wishes by "smartly" showing the "needed" controls. I would have thought Microsoft learned its lesson regarding second-guessing the user with an amateur attempt at AI, after the debacle that was automatic outline numbering in Word 97.
The ribbon provides live previews of changes before you apply them.
That is genuinely useful. What does it have to do with ribbons? It certainly doesn't replace any aspect of a menu bar. It could easily be its own panel or window.
Etc.. etc.. etc.. The ribbon is a net win if you give it a chance. Most people that argue against it have not given it a chance.
Forgive me, but this sounds like yet another "Windows/Microsoft product X is okay once you get used to it" statement. It's a true statement, but that doesn't mean the software is good. It just means one can learn to tolerate it.
