"tens of thousands" is a crazy over estimation. The whole point of Microsoft Word is to align stylized text on a canvas. The Word Art feature does not appear to use much, if any, functionality that does have some more mundane purpose elsewhere in the application.
On top of that, I think you may be forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out. There was a clear market for this feature at the time, and they've only made incremental changes to it since.
I think it is very likely much more time. Fonts are hard and the mere existence of text which doesn't move in a straight line adds enormous complexity. Also don't forget that it's existence requires competitors to implement similar things.
>On top of that, I think you may be forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out. There was a clear market for this feature at the time
No, I am not forgetting that. I am saying that this exact thought process is why we have so much awful software.
On top of that, I think you may be forgetting how common shitty banners were in the early 90's when this feature first came out. There was a clear market for this feature at the time, and they've only made incremental changes to it since.