Ned, as an AD I read dozens of documents a week and offer suggestions on those
documents. These changes frequently require negotiation, but for AD reviews
specifically, not having change tracking means that if I offer a heavy edit on
a particular document, there's a good chance I'm just wasting my time, because
the author won't bother to integrate it.
Something that makes this as easy as change tracking in MS word would
_substantially_ reduce my workload while at the same time increasing my
effectiveness. I agree that if you are only editing one document every so
often, it won't make much difference.
The other thing an easy tool might do is make it easier for IETF participants
to usefully do reviews, meaning that we might get more reviews. It would in
particular make it much easier for working groups to collaborate on documents,
rather than leaving it to one or two designated authors.
(BTW, I am _not_ proposing that we use Microsoft Word in the toolchain, nor
that git isn't useful. I am not a fan of Word, and I am a fan of git. The
point of mentioning Word is that change tracking is something it does right;
the point of saying that git isn't good enough for this application is that it
isn't, not to say that it isn't good enough for other applications.)