The latest openoffice.org builds have been stripped of most of the
spellchecking it used to have.

I understand this is for performance reasons.

Unfortunately spellchecking is a major feature of an office suite, so
this reduces oo to a plaything for all non-english speakers out there
(the vast majority). One should not have to download major parts of
the system in non-rpm form on a RedHat/fedora release. This is
actually more important than all the prettification that's been going
on for the last releases.

All major oo languages should be provided in rpm form. If they may not
be used all at once, that means separate rpms. Using a macrofied doc
to get them manually is really painfully reminicent of non-packaged
legacy OSs practices.