That is the primary reason I keep office around for as well. No alternative offers decent footnotes / endnotes / reference without going to latex (that I have found). For something as simple as a two page paper for an undergrad class, I do not want have to use latex just to get footnotes done correctly. I would be interested to know if the latest version actually does any better.
What difficulties are you having with footnotes? I just finished working on a 200 and something page document in LibreOffice 4.3, with multiple footnotes on most pages (and mildly complicated things like re-starting the numbering for each chapter), and working with footnotes seemed pretty straightforward. I'd be interested to find out how your (and the parent poster's) experience differed from mine.
