Hi,
Getting common applications working is NOT the goal of wine. The goal of wine is to write an open source reimplementation of the Win32 api. Those two goals are related, but not exactly the same. The difference is how to deal with hacks that are known to be incorrect but happen to fix an application. Those are not accepted into wine, no matter which application they fix.
CrossOver uses Wine under its hood, and CrossOver's wine tree contains some hacks to make Microsoft Office and other popular applications happy. However, CodeWeavers contributes patches back and employs many major developers to work on various parts of wine, including Alexandre Julliard, Robert Shearman, Jakec Caban, me, and many others.
Neither Wine nor CrossOver are specifically targeted at games or office applications. CrossOver supports some games(like Half-Life 1 and 2, World of Warcraft, Prey), and my job is to work on Wine's Direct3D support.
I won't be able to convice you that the whole thing is not a conspicary because I am a codeweavers employee, but maybe searching the wine changelog for @codeweavers.com can convice you? (Though many codeweavers employees use their own private mail address to send patches).
Regarding the hacks to get Microsoft Office running, the modified Wine source in CrossOver is publically available at http://www.codeweavers.com/products/source . You are welcome to locate the hacks that fix Microsoft Office(I think their authors will kindly assist you with that), clean them up and send them to wine-patches for inclusion. (on a sidenode, a few weeks ago I noticed that some mirror had a broken copy of the archive which did not unpack completely. I think it should be fixed by now. So if the archive doesn't unzip its not conspiracy, it is a fault of the provider of our mirrors)
Hope my explanations answer your questions, Stefan