What is the NON-FAIL way to do an excellent import? from Microsoft Word to ID
Depends on what you're importing. No, seriously.
I work in a translation firm, so what wind up doing is exporting perfectly-styled RTFs from InDesign, processing them in various ways, sending them to twenty different translators, and then flowing the resulting RTFs or Word files back into InDesign. Each Word file comes from a different translator, and has "quirks" that prevent a simple place-the-text-and-clear-overrides workflow. Over the years, I've gotten to know these quirks - the Vietnamese team tends to accidentally chew up tables, the Russian editor doesn't know how to use track changes and leaves stray underlines and highlights throughout the document, and so on. There are translators whose files can be placed without pre-processing and be reliably expected to import without any errors or misapplied forrmatting, and those translators do not use Word at all.
If you need to only place Word files that come from, say, your coworkers, then you have some options (careful administrative-level control of Word document templates, for example) that will help you tame your Word files. If you need to be able to take any Word file from any source and place it into ID, you will need to do a great deal of pre-processing. There will be no "excellent" way to place Word docs in ID. I have some VBA scripts that help me clean up Word files before placing into ID, and then some Javascript that helps me clean up what has been placed. But there's no single magical method of handling these files that will always work in any situation.