Microsoft Project - Any Improvements

I was wondering if anyone out there in BlogLand knows if Microsoft Project has had any decent improvements since Project 2000 ? I find myself using Project more and more to manage my own engineering, particularly the coding I have for our joint project with Mitsui and I'm > 5 years out of date.

The things I find most bad about Project 2000 are:

• Its persistent and dasdardly tendency to eat its own data files. I've been nailed by this so many times in the past that it scares me. Still its the only project management tool I've got so I keep using it. In particular cutting and pasting things seems to cause corruption.
• Saving to HTML. I find myself always having to select a Map when I save to HTML. Is there a new Feature like "Automatically Save to HTML using Template Foo?"
• Do I have to update to a whole new version of Office to get a new version of Project? Right now I'm happily using my personal copy of Office 2000 I bought back in 1999. Feedster the company doesn't even own a copy of Office on Windows (our machines other than myself and 2 admins are, I believe, all OSX or all Linux).  I'm dramatically more likely to upgrade to Project if it doesn't require a new version of Office since I run projected exclusively on my old Thinkpad X20 laptop (only 384 megs of RAM; Windows 2000).

Robert ? Is there a blog by a Microsoft Project Product Manager that could address these questions?