New outlook is quite honestly a joke. I tried to like it but went back to the old outlook as crucial features were missing. Simple things such as shift+f3 to change case to upper/lower/sentence case. This I believe stems from spell check being missing, another big issue for those with custom dictionaries. Poorly implemented template and template file management, I could go on...
If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.
I had no idea shift+F3 was there. If I even thought to look for such a feature I would assume it is in the right-click context menu and wouldn’t need a shortcut for it since I would use it once a decade. Now I wonder what kind of environment you work in where that is needed (and I work in an environment where a critical application requires Caps-Lock on for any extended usage).
This shows the problem with people who think the features in Office apps that they don’t use are bloat. If you made a new app using the 80% of features all the users regularly used, you’d discover you need 100% of those features because 20% of the users use a different set of obscure features.
This is absolutely true. Perhaps Microsoft have painted themselves into a corner, their catch-all marketing racking up significant tech debt. But in the same breath I honestly can't see what the value proposition would be for their office applications without it.
Regarding your first paragraph, if you're curious, I work for a multinational where we deal with company names, this is kept uniformly in uppercase in our internal system, globally there's too many variations and it gets visually messy (such as GmbH, there's also user errors to consider). However emailing external third parties, it looks a little unprofessional sending this information ALL IN CAPS.
If I intended on using a basic email editor, I would not have installed Outlook on my PC, I think the product manager or whoever is in charge of it's direction completely misunderstands the purpose/use-case of their programs.