@Scoot : Also, just wondering what people are doing at present in order to get around this…
This is the approach I highly recommend, not only because it does what you want right now with minimal effort, but because it’s the right way to do it, in terms of best practices (which means not having to mess around with all of the manual labour issues you refer to). Even if I were using a Mac to generate word processing documents, that is the approach I would take, I would not use Scrivener’s feature.
Do note this link takes you to other posts that go into greater detail, if all of this style-first approach is new, particularly in how to achieve that with the compile settings, and there is also a follow-up post further down in that thread.
That said, I’m speaking mainly here as someone more familiar with the LibreOffice way of doing things. I understand Word isn’t quite the same when it comes to styling. But since LO is free, it’s maybe worth trying. What I really like about the LO is that the stylesheet can drive just about everything you would want to do with page flow, headers and footers, dynamic numbering and so forth. I.e. from one simple “Heading 1” declaration in Scrivener you can end up with a relatively complete design in a matter of seconds—as long as it takes to open the design starter file and run a single menu command to import the compiled .odt file.
The main point of work up front is changing how one approaches compiling, and coming up with a Format that does as little as possible, rather than as much as possible. The more one thinks of what Scrivener creates as raw data (styled text, not formatted text), the better this method works.