Microsoft Office licensing and annoyance

Microsoft Licensing and Installation Blues

So recently I had an executive drop his laptop on my desk with the command that he needed MS Project installed (in 20 minutes).

"No Problems" I thought and went to the Office 365 admin portal, allocated a license to him and proceeded to login to the office portal with his account to download the installer.

All went well until I went to run the installer.  At this point it complained that it needed an administrative account to install.

By default we restrict users from installing software, so I ran the install as my administrative user.  This got a bit further, however then it popped up an error that it could not install because it could not download files required for the installation.  AAARGh, how bloody annoying can you get?!  Check that there are no firewall blocks (local firewall is set to pop up a dialogue box if this is blocked)

Ok so time is not on my side, and I will shortly have an exec  on my shoulder asking where his laptop is. Quick google using the error code "error-code 30182-1011 (3) unable to download file"  and there is very little help.  Looks like it is another generic Microsoft error, with the suggestion to "uninstall Office and reinstall".  Given that it takes 20 minutes to install, I'd hate to think how long it is going to take to uninstall all the versions of office on this laptop and re-install Office365, then try the Project installation.  With no guarantee that this is going to work.

OK so is there a way to get the full install for Ms Project? Yes, the Office Offline installer gives this option, but it needs you to know the exact name of the software you want to install and the shortname which you have to place in the correct location in the installation.xml file.  Of course documentation on this is written  in legalese i.e. you need to spend 2 days reading one paragraph to understand what you need to do.  Why can't MS just give you the option to download the full file from the link at Office365 ?  (I know, they only want you to download the minimum so that they can control installations.)

When I gave the exec the unfortunate news, he was not happy :(
What I have suggested is that some future time when he does not need his machine for the day, I will back it up, uninstall all Office installations and do a fresh Office365 install on his machine. The aim is to make it possible to do the installation should he need it urgently in the future.

But my big question is for Microsoft.  When I am shelling out for an E3 license to allow me to install the software locally on my computer, I want to be able to download the full installation at one time, not have a quick installer download and then have to ensure that internet connectivity will allow me to download the rest of the software.  Why is this not offered as an option?   Worse still, in the above case, the Click-to-Run version that was installed as a default with windows 10 had actually worked to block the installation of new software.  Why did the installer not pop up an error stating that multiple versions of Office had been found and offer to uninstall any unneeded software?

I'm sure that with the MS move to a completely subscription based software, this will be become less of an issue but in the meantime, at least give us useful error messages instead of generic WTF errors that help no-one.