At the end of the day, any software really has to choose what to prioritize. You can't have good online collaboration unless you design the tool around that--or I suppose if the documents folks are working on are incredibly simple.
Think of it like Excel and Google Sheets. Excel was designed for offline first, but Google Sheets always had online editing as a first-class citizen. Excel today has actually surprisingly great collaboration features, but it's sometimes buggy, and things don't always work the way you might expect. By contrast, Google Sheets is designed from the ground up to be online, and while you can save a file for offline editing, it doesn't actually put anything useful on your disk. Even if you have Google Drive, you just get a .gsheets file that is essentially a link the the document.
I guess where I'm going is, you just have to choose your battles. Be good at one thing, rather than mediocre at both.
I’ve been working on collaborative editing for the past decade or so. There’s no technical reason you can’t have both aspects work well. Eg, although git doesn’t support real-time collaborative editing, there’s no problem coming online and offline while working with git. Crdt based approaches should work online / offline just as well.
It may take extra development time though. The trade off of development time is real.
Think of it like Excel and Google Sheets. Excel was designed for offline first, but Google Sheets always had online editing as a first-class citizen. Excel today has actually surprisingly great collaboration features, but it's sometimes buggy, and things don't always work the way you might expect. By contrast, Google Sheets is designed from the ground up to be online, and while you can save a file for offline editing, it doesn't actually put anything useful on your disk. Even if you have Google Drive, you just get a .gsheets file that is essentially a link the the document.
I guess where I'm going is, you just have to choose your battles. Be good at one thing, rather than mediocre at both.