Here's my opinionated opinion. Normal mode should have the skinny columns, and not be WYSIWYG. We already have a WYSIWYG mode. However, my screen isn't tall enough to show a whole page at a sensible zoom, so if I'm reading through columned text in Page Layout mode, I have to keep scrolling up and down. If I have normal mode, with a single column, it's down all the way.
Normal mode is for easy text entry, without having to worry about margins or page boundaries. It's not even clear that it should show page boundaries, given that page layout view shows them perfectly well. -- David Chart
