Is pages falling behind

No application is going to be all things to all people. Every developer makes choices about what features to include. Microsoft has seemed to go in the "put in every conceivable feature" direction with Word. Apple has gone another way and has chosen not to include things that lots of people never use. Keep in mind that, unlike Word, Pages is free. That probably affects development priorities as well.

Use the tool that best meets your needs. And let Apple know your thoughts here:

Product Feedback - Apple

Personally, I've never found the need to use a macro in a word processing program. So, its presence or absence in such a program would be irrelevant to my judgment of the program's fitness for use.

Microsoft Word was originally conceived to compete with WordPerfect and contains many advanced features for desktop publishing and integrated programming with Visual Basic for Applications built-in.

Apple Pages does not compete with anyone, is free of charge and is designed for simplicity.

Apple is not competing with any third-party vendor with respect to Pages feature set and chooses to keep Pages to its original design goal as a consumer-oriented application. If you want more professional features, then use your choice of third-party application that provides the features that you require.

Microsoft did not just dump a bunch of features into Word over the last 35 years, but rather, did so in response to revenue from corporate clients requesting those features. Look how long it took the Pages product team to implement Mail merge differently than how it worked well in Pages '09. Nearly nine years of customers pleading for it… 😉