The ribbon is far more productive as it is at least discoverable without much effort.

Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. To find out you have to play mystery meat with tooltips for ages.

We have a mix of Windows machines with MS Office and Ubuntu machines with LO here for our admin staff (with each staff member using both for different tasks), and I get far more questions about how to find things in the MS ribbon than I do in the LO menus (and LO tends to be used for more complicated operations, it part of a high-speed scanner / data work-flow system).

> Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do.

But one doesn't need to use the toolbar buttons, one can still select things from the menus in the old fashioned way.

Can still do that with the ribbon. Press Alt.

Most people have no idea that that is possible. To find out you have to play mystery meat with keys for ages.

In my student days, "mystery meat" was for stuff that you never found out about what it was.

RTFM, it's even searchable these days.

Or, you know, learn/set up keyboard shortcuts if you're going to be working with the software regularly.