Thank you for the pointers, and I agree the products haven't been completely abandoned.
I do follow along with these updates as a regular Pages and Numbers user. However, my observation is that the products have stagnated. Despite the steady stream of small updates, Apple hasn't fixed important, longstanding bugs with their software (e.g., inaccurate table of contents ordering relative to actual document content, styles not always applied when you select them), and they have not fixed significant usability issues (lack of the ability to update a document's style based on some other style, lack of any coherent bullet feature that relates to a style, lack of rich conditional formatting options in Numbers, very limited shortcuts for styles) in the ~15 years I've been using iWork.
Making bulleted lists drop dead simple to create (and well formatted by default) would go a long way. Allowing users to apply styles between existing docs (a la Google Docs) would as well.
My hope is that the team has simply been so swamped with cloud features and iOS/iPadOS parity over the last few years that they haven't been able to prioritize big changes. Maybe with those out of the way, they will have time to focus on the core experience again, motivated by new competition in the space.
I do follow along with these updates as a regular Pages and Numbers user. However, my observation is that the products have stagnated. Despite the steady stream of small updates, Apple hasn't fixed important, longstanding bugs with their software (e.g., inaccurate table of contents ordering relative to actual document content, styles not always applied when you select them), and they have not fixed significant usability issues (lack of the ability to update a document's style based on some other style, lack of any coherent bullet feature that relates to a style, lack of rich conditional formatting options in Numbers, very limited shortcuts for styles) in the ~15 years I've been using iWork.
Making bulleted lists drop dead simple to create (and well formatted by default) would go a long way. Allowing users to apply styles between existing docs (a la Google Docs) would as well.
My hope is that the team has simply been so swamped with cloud features and iOS/iPadOS parity over the last few years that they haven't been able to prioritize big changes. Maybe with those out of the way, they will have time to focus on the core experience again, motivated by new competition in the space.