There's nothing wrong, as such, with the default setup in Word. A paragraph is a unit of formatting in Word (and in many other word processors). If you want gaps between your paragraphs (as most people would, most of the time), you're supposed to set up your paragraph style to have a space either before or after it. (It's debatable which is better.) What you should NOT do is press carriage return twice, leaving a dangling, empty, useless paragraph between your two paragraphs. This could cause complete havoc if and when you reformat your document at a later stage.

It's also in no way new to Office 2008 for Word to have spacing attached to its default paragraph style. This goes back... oh, back to about when Word first introduced styles. (Though I seem to remember that over the years they've swapped between putting the blank space before and after the paragraph.)

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I've read all these arguments way it is correct to have this gap between paragraphs, but it still doesn't make sense and I have never in my life read a book, magazine, or newspaper that has a gap between paragraphs, it is just indented on the next line.

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