[Some stream of consciousness for your consideration]
Folks, let's admit that InDesign is a "legacy" product, and has clearly been put out to pasture.
When the last original developer in Seattle (Doug Waterfall) was let go, after the development team was outsourced to India, that was pretty much the death knell for InDesign over the long run.
I'm not knocking the Indian team--they're a lot of great, highly talented people who are passionate about what they're doing.
But without the original set of people who architected and implemented the core feature set, the product (which is millions of lines of code) will inevitably stray from the original principles and clean design that enabled it to exist and cohere in the first place. Heck, perhaps even if the Seattle team had stayed intact this would have happened, since people do die or retire, and the product is almost 30 years old now (it started internally long before its first release). Even just the act of adding features/fixing bugs will inevitably generate more problems that need to be dealt with--the subtle interactions among the hundreds of code modules are exponentially hard and growing each each change.
Gathering from what we know from Adobe folk about monthly active users, InDesign generates on the order of $1B annually. So there's really not any question of killing the product (too damned lucrative) or of any lack of resources. But, cynically speaking, InDesign is a cash cow put out to pasture (wait, aren't all cows put out to pasture?), where Adobe only has to add/fix a few major things each year to keep people from wondering too much about what their subscription is really buying them.
The real problem is just the massive inertia inherent in the size of the product itself--each feature (of which there are hundreds, at least, even counting only major features/aspects of the product) could be improved/extended/fixed.
If you ask 100 InDesign experts to give you their top 10 feature improvements/extensions/fixes, you'd get probably 600 quite different answers among them. What can you do with that? How do you prioritize? Yes, you can ask here in the forum and get your 600 answers, but then you've gotta pick 5-10 for the next major release. At that rate, it'll take decades to get to them all. And, meanwhile, your code quality is all the time declining inevitably from all the piecemeal changes made by people who can't be experts in the whole architecture, since they have to reverse engineer the intent of the original authors, even if they were as talented as the latter. (Which is unlikely, given the stratospheric engineering talent in the original team.)
So all this brainstorming might be cathartic, but in the end realize that it's a losing proposition.
What's the answer? Start from scratch with a whole new product design that's more oriented to the web era where print communication is secondary, and is derived from the web? Perhaps, but then you're looking at a hundreds-of-man-years project which of course you can't accomplish with a team bigger than a couple dozen talented people (see classic Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month"), so it'll take decades again.
And it won't likely come from Adobe, unless they pull an "XD for print" and start afresh. And that's unlikely given the print market's long-term decline. Perhaps if Chuck and John were still around there might be the top-level impetus to take Adobe's massive resources and invest in a print-technology renaissance as a kind of paean to the enduring virtues of print we all know and love. Dream on, but even then the new mythical product wouldn't be compatible with InDesign, nor should it be. Gotta start fresh sometime, though perhaps (since it's mythical it's easy to fantasize) the new product could bring over as much InDesign content/layout as possible.
While print won't die, it's certainly in a long-term decline with obviously a non-zero but flat tail forever. So maybe InDesign development should just follow that same tail down. And, realistically, that's exactly where we are today.
Yes, that's defeatist, and I suppose in the face of long-term defeat the only thing to do (if you must produce artifacts to print) is to man up, re-shuffle the burden on your back, beg for the features that would improve your day-to-day life, and carry on.
Signed,
[A long-term third party developer who needs to remain anonymous for obvious reasons]
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