Hi David
When we "add" structure we are also removing the connection between the paragraph style and the list style/counter. Let say in Word I have a style called "phil" to which I have associated a list style that makes the each paragraph that has the "phil" style display with a letter in front of it (A, B, C, etc.) When going to openoffice the list style is preserved but would have to be decoupled from the paragraph style. Plus each paragraph of the "phil" style would have to be wrapped in <list> elements. This is a loss of information because what I want as a user is that anything I style with "phil" has A, B, C, etc. in front of it. Is this information loss traumatic? Maybe not but it's real and should be addresses.
Bigger Picture
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What openoffice has done with the <list> element is attempt to take the very simplest case of "numbered paragraphs" in word processors and turn them into structure so they can be easily processed. In doing so they have complicated all the other cases of "numbered paragraphs" and were forced to add a whole new mechanism to deal with "numbered headings". I again recommend we abandon this well intentioned but problematic scheme and model "lists" as the major word processors do. This not only unifies all "numbered paragraph" in the schema but also allow better transfer of the user's intention from the major word processing formats.
-Phil