Terry,
Hopefully, you will find that it isn't so much typesetting your dissertation as it is creating a well-presented document with proper graphs, citations, footnotes, etc. I might have done that using Word, but once you typeset a document you can't go back to plain, old word processing. The quality of one's work is as important as the quantity. Looks are everything. Despite the contrary people really do tell the book by its cover. First appearances are the most important.
I've read all the reviews and have used both programs. Pages is not Word. Not even close. For my needs, I do not want something that may work with other programs needed in order to provide non-existent capabilities. Scrivener is somewhat better as is Ulysses, but neither can do what Word can do. With InDesign, I can use any word processor or TextEdit. Hardly makes a difference what I use for the writing. I then rely on InDesign to produce my finished, typeset document. I suppose for something with more than 50-60 pages one might prefer Word for its large document handling.
But in the end, you use whatever tools you prefer. When I was active there were much fewer tools available. When I worked on my textbook I started with Word 1.0 on a CP/M computer. Pagemaker 1.0 (the original predecessor of InDesign) could not do facing page numbering. I had to wait for 2.0 in order to do that and line up the last text lines on the facing pages. For very large documents, like books, Word became the best tool. InDesign excelled with the layout, Word with document size. There are better writing tools today than 20 years ago, but today I still prefer Word. I don't need to use InDesign anymore. However, today I hardly need more than TextEdit. I mostly use Word to read someone else's document.
