How about making a special field/character in word that updates automatically
as a work-around, for example, for documents with a lot of references and
repeated uses of references.  Key to this working would be that the use of
reference, say, number 2 could occur early on and then later after reference
number 6 but all uses would be linked so that adding a reference before the
first occurance of number 2 would bump all subsequent references up by one
without causing the first and second occurances of reference now-3 to be
numbered differently.  See example below.

It'd actually be nice if the numbers weren't even linked to anything else
like footnotes/endnotes so that they could be used in multiple ways.

Example:
FIRST VERSION:
blah blah blue [1].  blah blah red[2].  blah blah green [3]. blah blah blah
red[2].

Added text with reference:
blah blah blue [1].  new new new yellow[2].  blah blah red[3].  blah blah
green [4].  blah blah blah red[3].

I'm sure there's probably some way to get these results using endnotes etc,
but this would be such a useful tool if left flexible and with no more
formatting associated with it than what I've described.