Honestly? You have nothing but my sympathy. If I were forced into a workflow where I had to take words and run them through a four-step workflow that involved hand-typing shit into Preview after getting Word to play nicey-nicey with my images, I'd have a heart-to-heart with my employer about the amount of effort being wasted on layout and how they could probably hire a community college intern just to prettify the writing and still come out ahead. I have never been forced into a corner where people who need InDesign-level tweakatude don't have a couple InDesign galley slaves for that specific purpose.
Yeah. We have had that talk, and the InDesign/Writer grunt employee for me is on the plan... but then we got purchased by a big company, and are doing the "right-sizing transition" thing, as the new company figures out where to throw money at us for the biggest wins. I expect that by this time next year, most of my current work will be an assembly process for a recent-graduate level InDesign geek with a penchant for writing. I will write the "interesting" bits and focus on my Competitive Intel research and analysis, and manage the production of sales proposals and case studies. InDesign is cool... but I used PageMaker and Quark and Illustrator for far too many years to fit another iteration of those design tools into my whisky-addled brain!