Office is so smart to be so dumb

I try not to use Office much,  but sometimes I do and I am so sick of it stalling shutdowns because a document was not explicitly saved. Do they REALLY think you want to lose whatever you just did? They should freaking SAVE as default. It is probably because of some legal crap that says they need to have the user induce the save because it could over-write data. I don't know, but it is absurd. There isn't even a good option to just auto-save the darn thing, you can only have it auto-save the recovery file, but still get prompted (as far as I can tell). Oh well.