Word left a bad taste in my mouth from that first release. Our secretaries ("Sexa-taries") were using Xerox dedicated word processors - beautiful things. Someone got the bright idea to switch to "Turd" on PCs. It was an unmitigated disaster, but cheaper as the Xerox machines were expensive and leased. Everybody was bitching about it - especially when the thing would crash and take their document with it. M$ shouldn't have EVER released that pile of garbage that lost data...
Never used or even saw PageMaker, although I remember the name. "VI" is still a thing - I use it fairly often, but it ain't WordStar. WordStar 4.0 was probably the very last new program released for CP/M - and it was a nice improvement over the old one (3.3?) that came before. Versions newer than 4.0 started to lose the fast usability that was a WS hallmark. WS was the classic example of "easy to use" vs. "easy to learn". The mouse based crap was easy to learn, WS wasn't. BUT - the inverse was true - WS was very fast and easy to USE once you learned it - the GUI stuff, not so much. Mice most certainly have their place - see my bitching about not having one in any of my anti-smartphone rants - but they are often slower than command line or other keyboard centric techniques. A WS 4.0 with mouse block selection - IN ADDITION TO the ^KB and ^KK technique - would be rather nice.
Like you, I just use a simple text editor for 99% of my work - my life revolves around simple .TXT files.