John Johann wrote:styles in our Word docs are inherited but currently maintained by yours truly. The styles in our HnM projects are based on said Word styles and maintained by me... Style(name)s need attention... I'm looking for a fairly simple, resilient solution.
You obviously understand Word styles, so I won't go into so much detail again. If you've already created styles in Help & Manual with names identical to those in your corporate DOT template, the problem may be that the compiler is prepending 'H&M_' to each style when publishing to DOCX. So when you apply your corporate template to your published output, it doesn't have any effect because the style names don't match.
If that's the case, the most resilient solution would be to ask ec-Software to add an option
"not to prepend style names with 'H&M_' when publishing to DOCX". That's far simpler than maintaining VBA code that iterates through all the DOCX style names after publishing, just to reverse undocumented behaviour you didn't want
By the way, if your corporate identity also applies to HTML/CSS you might also like an option
"not to prepend style names with 'p_' or 'f_' when publishing to WebHelp". This would allow you to have one set of style names for all your publishing formats, but optionally have different definitions for HTML vs Word, that you maintain
outside Help and Manual. So when your corporate identity changes, you can update all your Web and Word material without needing to re-publish from H&M.