Following up on an earlier post...
I've tried a few alternative PDF products (which shall remain nameless). It is clear that Adobe creates really good, solid albeit sometimes annoying technology. In looking at reading capability, it is clear that Acrobat handles the more difficult situations effortlessly, and performance is quite good. Notwithstanding this, the majority of PDFs that I come across are quite mundane. An unsubstantiated guess is that most are created from basic MS Word documents.
The raison d'etre for the PDF was to maintain the sanctity of the print format when presented online. For the majority of documents (again unsubstantiated opinion), this is irrelevant. It is used the way it is because it is the easiest way to take a Word document and make it readable electronically.
If my guesses are correct, Adobe has really misread the main usage of Acrobat. Instead, the focus is continuing the development of Acrobat to keep it meaningful. Unfortunately, this direction is taking it away from its primary use case. Typically, product management is paid a lot of money to make bad judgements (being snarky) and this may be one of them. The product is better fulfilling uses cases other than just being a reader, the primary use case.
So, going back to looking at alternative products: what I've seen is that there are those that have some of the duality of Acrobat. What was done, however, was an acceptance of this duality: there was a way to switch the product between an Edit mode and a Reader mode. Something such as this might go a long way towards quieting people like us.
And, as a response to other comments in this thread...
One of the things that I do when designing a document for within Acrobat was signalling if I wanted the left pane to display. In many cases I did as this left pane would contain an outline of the information that is in my document. By manually creating a structure, I could facilitate my reader's access to the information. (I never found a use for thumbnails.)
It should, of course, be up to the reader if they want never to the left pane by default. However, as a document's designer, I want to have the ability to say how I want to be.
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