Apologies for not having come across your post earlier. There are hundreds of posts every week, and only so many of us that have the time to go through them.
The frustrating thing was that the minimal paragraph styles I had in place in the earlier version of Scrivener worked beautifully in compile. I wouldn’t consider any of them the ‘wall-to-wall styling’ you mention, but all carry the differing POV for particular characters, and made it easier to read.
I’m not sure of the particulars in how you used the older version, but one thing to be aware of is that it never had styles. That’s a new feature entirely. The old version has formatting presets, which were a way of implementing hard-coded formatting directly. Once you applied a preset that was it, it was just formatted text. There was no way at all to produce a stylesheet-friendly document, without going in after the fact in Word and manually doing so, line by line.
So yes, that approach is fundamentally simpler since there isn’t really much complexity to it behind the scenes. Something that I think will help you out, once you have the time to and are past the deadline on this story, is to invest some time in learning the Styles pane in the compiler. Given how you describe using formatting as a writing tool and not an export tool, it will be good to know how you can take what is purely for your benefit as a writer (like POV highlighting) and make it so that in the end it prints normally like all other text.
It’s a little more work, but once you see how it fits together it’s actually not too bad, especially if you keep your compile settings up to date as you work. You add a new POV colour or whatever while writing, pop into the compile settings and make it look normal on output, save your settings and get back to writing. It’s a 30 to 60 second thing you do now and then.
I look forward to some official Scrivener videos on formatting manuscripts and paperbacks in the new windows version.
I’m not sure what the status is on those. We had to delay them since in the time leading up to the launch there wasn’t enough in place to demonstrate properly. But that aside, the core design is fundamentally the same, to the point that the Mac videos will suffice to describe exactly how to do these things. Having a Windows version of the video will thus almost be more of a theme on what you see being presented.