On the bright side, competition may be helpful for open source projects. Example: postfix and exim. Other example - squid: no competitors, slow development and ugly bugs.

I wouldn't say OO competes with LO, it's way behind.

More than merely way behind, AOO is nearly stopped. The few commits it has seem to be almost all trying to fix build issues.

Which then begs the question, why does Apache even bother? Can't they just re-gift the trademarks, etc over to TDF? Or at the very least be upfront and honest that OpenOffice is now abandon-ware?

OpenOffice is a better and more accessible name, although it does have some trademark issues, I think.