Burgundavia, our ODT support is on-par with our RTF and DOC support, which is to say that it's pretty darn good right now. It will be in our upcoming 2.4.2 release, due out in a few days. If you like to live dangerously, try out the CVS HEAD build.

I don't know who the "they" is in your last anectdote, but I never said that ODT support wasn't important; rather, I don't understand the hype around the format. And if you'd been using MS file formats, you'd still have the choice of switching to Abi+Gnumeric or (gasp) even Microsoft Office. OpenDocument is surely a useful tool, but it is not the panacea that people make it out to be.