I worked on a document management system 10 years ago, we would loved to have used webdav to present a virtual filesystem from our (linux) servers to Office cli

I worked on a document management system 10 years ago, we would loved to have used webdav to present a virtual filesystem from our (linux) servers to Office clients for document retrieval/conversion. It was just impossible. As you say, every version of office & windows had different, severe bugs that meant we couldn't get something as simple as browsing a directory, loading & saving files to work across all versions, and it wasn't like recent versions were better - it was completely unreliable. It turned out to be easier to write plugins for all versions of office than it was to rely on office's own code actually working.