Acrobat Export to HTML is abysmal--on purpose?

[Jason Burnett]

I needed to provide comments on a police report and every time I tried to do it with Acrobat, it struggled to select the correct text or fields. It was a complete mess. No matter which type of annotation I selected or whether I edited the properties of every comment (there were more than 100) to leave the author field and subject field blank, it just ignored me when it comes to summarizing the comments. 

And because every comment had this header with a pedantic icon that I didn't want, with Author: field that I didn't want, with the time and the subject--all of which I didn't want, it became quickly impossible to rely on Acrtobat in any capacity for annotations.

No problem, I'll export the original form to HTML and manage comments myself using Javascript and my own comment library. 

The HTML that Adobe produced from the original document is terrible. Not only is it functionally terrible, but it looks nothing like the original. It's not even recognizable as the same document. 

So when I started to think about it, surely Adobe can do better than this. Why are the messing up HTML? Then it dawned on me that they are just protecting their interest. If you could easily produce your forms in HTML rather than relying on Acrobat, they would lose customers. So they hobble their export engines and pretend that we should just accept this lower standard if we want to use industry standard HTML and CSS for our work.

I figure it's either that or gross incompetene. Does anyone have any insight into why Adobe would do this that isn't as nefarious as it seems? I'd like to believe Adobe is better than that, but I'm seriously beginning to wonder. 

So Acrobat Fan Boys, help me out here.

[JR Boulay · Accepted solution]

Technically, the reason is that the HTML export module hasn't changed in twenty years or so.
As for the rest, I don't know.