Hide Spreads... and?

I'm starting a separate topic because I don't want to throw sourballs in the more or less official one. But having looked at this highly-promoted feature, my reaction is... Yeah, so? And?

So you can go to a spread in the Parent pages view, and toggle it Hide and UnHide. This has two effects: it puts a little icon on the spread, and when you do any kind of export, that spread will be omitted from the output.

Did I miss something?

It's not that this might not be useful for some designers and some projects, but in scope and scale it seems be "added featurette" at most. In implementation, it seems under-thought. And the potential for confusion and frustration may be out of proportion.

It does not, as an exchange in the primary topic concedes, change page numbering. So for a brochure or presentation or the like, it's good. But for anything like a publication, it becomes next to useless unless you accept gaps in your export page numbering. (Maybe for client drafts. Maybe to omit an advertising insert. Pretty narrow situations.) And there are other things it doesn't do in this respect, all because it flags the spreads as "hidden" but does not in any way actually omit them.

And unless I missed something, the entire indication that a spread is hidden is the icon in the Pages pane. No, say, tint on those icons. No overlay, watermark or tint on the hidden pages, nor do they disappear from the layout. Almost completely invisible function that sure as shootin', is going to drive some number of us batty one late tired night when we just can't figure out why only half our pages will export to PDF. (Cue a continuing stream of new users/beginners asking this very question.)

Maybe useful, to some. Functionality too limited to be of very wide use. And 'transparent' operation that is sure to confuse even skilled users, for which a learning curve won't help much.

Frankly, I'd say take it back out until it's fully baked. Until then, a post-it on the monitor might be useful: "Did you Remember to Un-Hide?"