@narrsd, thanks for the friendly words!
I discovered a similar routine using the style painter to tame some list anomalies. But there’s obviously more to lists than indenting.
I am finding that basic copy and pasting between Word and Scrivener, in either direction, is converting text formatting just fine for the most part, including in lists. Unnumbered bullets copied from Word into Scriv display an unusual widget font instead of conventional “dot” bullets (more at this post.) And Word “Headings” do not paste into Scrivener AS “Headings,” but the actual formatting is retained. Which is a relief. I remember wrestling with that back in the Scrivener 1.8 (or earlier?) days.
I’m finding that using Scrivener’s sync to generate rtf versions and then opening them in Word is working very nicely, with formatting as well as actual “Headings” getting converted reliably, provided the Style assignment originated in Scrivener. Word reads them fine, and if you add Headings in Word, they are read as actual Headings when synced back into Scriv. Lists too are making the round trip well – though trying to reorder them in Scriv brings us back to the OP.
Well it depends on how long the list is and how many levels, and how often you might want to revise it. Having to remove all the list formatting from a multilevel list (which turns it all into undifferentiated paragraphs) just to be able to rearrange the order of some items, is not an appealing way to work. With sync, once it’s set up, it’s proving to be quite straightforward, though not quite yet routine. I wish I’d known that sync was available back in version 1 before I took my Scrivener hiatus to wait for version 3.
I like what Amber said here, my emphasis added…