Word 2016 Cursor movement slow, jumpy, laggy, erratic, stuttering in some documents

is it safe to have both installed at once?

Yes.  I have 2008, 2011 and 2016 running side-by-side in El Capitan without problems.  The only restriction is be careful about starting more than one version of Outlook at a time, or you may be unable to find your email.

Also, i use numbers/pages for a lot of my work now because the 2011 Office software sucks on El Capitan.

Be careful of Pages and Numbers.  Their ability to open and work with Office files, and to export back to the Office file formats, is excellent.  But they make a horrid mess of the internal formatting property stores (the style tables) which may cause problems with Microsoft Office.

Hope this helps

Ok.  Only working with .docx format, even from mac word formats.  And mac is the latest and greatest.  So there is no legacy issue here.

Nothing irregular on CPU usage - below 5%.  Mem show a big draw (.5 gig) on something called System and Compressed Memory - whatever that is.  

Otherwise, still have the problem with the latest version download on my Office 365 account.

So is the general consensus that the 2016 Mac issues are fixed? I Reverted back the 2011 software back in October due to the issues but would love to switch back to 2016. 

I would say it like this: Several hundred issues, large and small, have now been fixed (if users have been applying the monthly updates coming out for both OS X and Word). Users who have disabled updates, or who are selective about what they apply will have a very poor experience.

Issues are being fixed in order, from those with the most impact to those with the least.  Sometimes, Microsoft makes a fix but needs to wait for a complimentary fix from Apple to enable the Microsoft fix to take effect.

The current state of play as of January 2016 is something like:

• Nearly all the issues have now been discovered.
• Most of the worst of them have been fixed.
• Some fixes are major work, and are still in progress.
• There are still several hundred issues left to fix, but hopefully none of them have a major impact for ordinary users.
• Stability is a lot better, speed is a lot better, responsiveness is a lot better: but the work in that area is nowhere near complete yet. Performance should be OK for ordinary users with non-complex documents.
• Unskilled users often create astonishingly complex documents without realising it.  Such users will continue to suffer performance problems.  See my earlier posts for tips on how to resolve these.
• Major performance improvements will result from work to change the architecture of the software and to optimise the software.  This is a very major project, and my guess is that it will not be fully complete for a year or two.
• Currently there are major issues with customisation, ribbon customisation, and VBA.  These are being worked on, but are major projects that will take time, and affect relatively fewer users so are not top-priority.
• Almost all of us will find "something" to be a major irritation that is low on the priority list for being fixed, because usage data shows that few people are using it, or its impact is small.  Everyone will have at least one "I wish they would fix..."  Use the Smiley Face to ensure that your issue gets on the list.  Enable feedback to Apple and Microsoft, to hurry it along: if they cannot see that lots of people are having the problem, a bug will be filed but it will remain at the bottom of the pile.
• Howls of anguish or outrage in here will have no effect, because Microsoft will never see it.  Use the Send Feedback button or they may never know you are having a problem.
• Use the UserVoice website to vote for suggested features and fixes.  It's the only way to get requests for new work onto the list.
• Because of the legal system in the USA, Microsoft can never take the risk of telling anyone what will be fixed, or when. Your MVPs sometimes get a "heads-up" about three days before a fix goes public, but very rarely.  Usually, we have no better idea than you do what is in the next update.

Hope this helps

"That was adjusted in one of the first updates released for Word 2016, and that fixed the issue for most folks."

Is that also true for Windows? 

Windows Word and Mac Word are made by the same people in the same department using the same tools and methodology.  Increasingly, Mac Word is Windows Word code re-compiled for the Mac and re-linked for Mac OS X.

So the short answer is "Yes and No".  Yes, Windows Word is following the same methodology and so will steadily improve with each monthly update.  But No, Windows Word is the master code base now, whose features and fixes are steadily being enabled on the Mac as they get them working.

If you like: Problems on Windows are "bugs" while problems on the Mac are "porting problems" (also bugs, but usually not in the design or coding; usually, problems with the porting process).

While fixes on Windows will often appear on the Mac in the next release, fixes on the Mac will very rarely roll back to Windows Word. What may happen is that a problem is not found in the testing process on Windows: it becomes apparent when the code is ported to the Mac.  By root-cause analysis, they discover that the bug is actually in the Windows code.  In that case, they will fix Windows, then roll the fix forward to the Mac. While there have been a few of those (the asterisks bug was a spectacular example...) it happens quite rarely, because the problems are usually caught on the Windows side.

Hope that explains it.