Feature suggestions for MS Word

Hi, I am writing a family cookbook in Word - and would like to suggest a couple of features to improve customizing certain pages.   Similar to PowerPoint, I would like to be able to create "master pages" that I can apply certain styles to (show/hide headers & footers, change background color, etc.) and then be able to assign a page to a certain page style.   For example:  Title pages, Table of Content pages, Chapter pages, regular content pages.   In this example, I would like to only display headers/footers on regular content pages, and have chapter pages have a different background color.

I realize I *should* be able to do this by creating "sections" - but frankly, the Sections functionality in Word sucks.