To this day I run a Windows 7 VM in Parallels on my MacBook Air in Coherence mode just so I can write blog posts in Windows Live Writer. I looked for years for a setup that could beat this, and unbelievably, never found it.
Not necessarily better, but sort of equivalent: Windows Terminal Server since version 2008-or-so has had "RemoteApp" support, meaning that you can configure the (multiplatform) Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect to a (single running app on a) Terminal Services server with a similar UX to Parallels' Coherence mode.
Azure offers what's effectively "Running-individual-apps-as-a-Service" by booting TS server VMs and serving RemoteApp sessions from them. They have a demo to see how it feels (https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/en/tour.aspx). If you don't like Azure, you could do something equivalent using e.g. AWS WorkSpaces instances.
Or, disregarding the networking aspect, you could just run your Windows VM headless on your MBA (and therefore using any VM software you like, e.g. VirtualBox) and RDP into it with the same RemoteApp configuration. It may or may not be more responsive than Coherence, but I'd bet on it being less battery-intensive.
Do you have any instructions on how to do RemoteApp with AWS Workspaces? I use an AWS Workspaces box to run a few key apps on Windows, and I'd love to use them in a more Coherence-mode style.
Checking further, it looks like AWS WorkSpaces doesn't actually support any protocol other than "Teradici PC-over-IP"—I'm guessing that whether or not you enable RDP on the remote, the AWS firewall policy won't expose the port. (This is apparently on purpose; WorkSpaces advertises "keeping your data on-premise by never exporting it to the client; the client only gets pixels.")
I guess plain EC2 Windows instances will still work, though. The setup is simple enough:
1. on the instance, select a base image of any edition of Windows 7/8/10 that supports receiving Remote Desktop Connections;
2. enable receiving Remote Desktop Connections on the instance's System prefs (might already be enabled if that's how they expect people to connect to manage their instances);
4. use the tool to generate an RDP connection profile on the instance—naming the session and browsing for an EXE path is usually enough;
5. in the same tool, generate an .rdp file for that session, and get it back to your computer;
6. import the .rdp file into Microsoft Remote Desktop;
7. edit the new RDP connection to supply the correct server address (from the client's perspective) and prepopulated authentication credentials.
Now launching that RDP session should give you e.g. a Notepad window on your desktop.
Note one restriction: if the EC2 instance you're running isn't a Server edition of Windows, you'll be restricted to one RDP session at a time. There are things you can do to get around this, though I'm not sure they're compliant with the Windows EULA.
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† The actual, official thing you're supposed to do is to have a Server-edition instance running the "Remote Desktop Connection Broker" service; the Server Manager app, pointed at that machine, then lets you manage "RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Resources" (i.e. an RDP session directory).
Interestingly, the "session host" instances that the Connection Broker, well, brokers for, can be any edition of Windows (but are usually Enterprise); productivity apps aren't written for, or tested with, Server-edition Windows, after all, so it wouldn't make sense for the instance the users actually connect to to be a Server.
The tool above basically skips the Broker by giving you the same .rdp profile the Broker would answer with after you negotiate with it. This is why the process feels so manual: if you had a Connection Broker server in-between, it'd be the thing transparently plugging in all those details for you, basically taking the .rdp "template" you get from the tool and filling out the client-side creds from the client step of the negotiation, and the server-side address by picking one of its load-balanced pool members.
I use MarsEdit on a Mac and (mostly) like it. I used Live Writer way back when but, at some point, I stopped doing so--don't remember why but I'm pretty sure it was before I switched off Windows.
MarsEdit is the client most people mention as a Mac replacement for Windows Live Writer, but after using WLW for years and then trying MarsEdit, it didn't hold a candle to WLW. It's shocking--WLW is a free tool that hasn't had active development since 2012--but true.
The reason is probably that the market for blog editors disappeared when WYSIWYG editors became good enough for most people and wifi became common. The level of hassle "fat clients" in the space end up being (with crappy caches, blocking interfaces etc) is not offset by the tangible benefits of offline editing and marginally-better media support.
I'm not a great fan of the Blogger editor, but I've not found any modern alternative that can beat it so much to consider paying for it.
The Blogger editor was so bad, for writing a blog with any amount of code snippets, that I got frustrated enough to bail on Blogger entirely and write a simple hand-rolled blog engine. There was absolutely no way to get it to not mangle the resulting content - even directly editing the HTML wasn't really reliable.
