Judging from your events, we’re about the same age, and I’ve used all these same tools at some point along the way along with a handful of others. Here are some of my thoughts:

• AppleWorks — I learned this in school too, but never used it outside of school because we didn’t own an Apple computer.
• Le Script — Our home computer was a TRS-80 Model 4, and this was arguably the best word processor available for it. Most my high school papers were written with this, printed on a dot matrix printer. I have very fond memories of this program, including the very nice manual that came with it
• WordStar — I think we got our first IBM PC compatible computer, the Amstrad PC1512, my senior year of high school. I remember replacing one of the floppy drives with a 5 MB hard drive. My high school math teacher asked, “how in the world will you ever use five megabytes of space?” Anyway, WordStar became my go-to word processor. I don’t think I ever paid for it, I believe someone gave me a copy of the disk. You could call it “old-school pirating”, but I think some people with peg legs, earrings, and eye patches might object. I loved it for the same reasons you loved WordPerfect.
• WordPerfect — I flirted with WordPerfect in college, but I loved WordStar too much to ever completely make the switch. I also never purchased WordStar, I just copied it off the school’s computer onto a floppy disk. I was such a pirate in those days (and to add to the symbolism, I was attending a maritime academy).
• Microsoft Word — I do remember how I first started with Word. We had a CAD/CAM lab at college that had a bunch of Mac IIfx machines. Those computers had Microsoft Word for Mac installed, and I immediately fell in love with WYSIWYG. At the time, the DOS version was still, well, DOS. But as I gradually migrated to Windows, I immediately made the switch to Word. Word was also the first word processor I paid for since LeScript (and technically my parents bought that, so Word was really the first one I paid for). I still pay for a subscription to Office 365, even though Word isn’t my primary word processor anymore. There are times when Word is the best option (and Excel is still the best option for spreadsheets).
• Google Docs — This never clicked with me, because offline access is absolutely critical for me. I tried some of the offline solutions, but they always felt cumbersome and unreliable. Google managed to lose one of my documents once, and I never returned.
• Scrivener — the one word processor that has a permanent place on my MacBook’s dock. Worried about syncing, the cloud, etc.? No worries, using Scrivener with DropBox is seamless. A local copy is maintained on my laptop and every other computer I own, along with a cloud copy available from anywhere. Granted I can’t use it on a public computer, but my MacBook travels just about everywhere with me.