InDesign itself is rock solid, and a pretty impressive piece of work. (Even if they are slowing down on development--I guess there's not all that much to do with it.)
On the UI, yes, it's a kinda half-way house. But most print-oriented designers live in InDesign, so they probably get used to it as their own little world.
That said, everything else about Adobe's suite (updating, serialization, etc.) is just punishingly bad, as Merlin points out.
It does tend to make one despair.
The main problem with Adobe that I can see is that the suits took over once Chuck Geschke and John Warnock left. These guys were consummate engineers, and their products reflected that fact.
And, then, to add insult to injury, Macromedia took over Adobe, and pretty much turned the company into a Flash-only place. I hate Flash and all that it stands for.
Oh well, maybe I'll whine privately at Chuck...
And, in some sense, InDesign is pretty much "complete" as far as what people expect in the print publishing world.
They're now slowly moving into more long-document features, etc, so it can be a replacement for much of the FrameMaker usage out there.
But, in the end, print publishing is slowly dying, so the future there is unclear, anyway.
Cruft isn't simply a measure of menu volume, and IMO it's not necessarily about removing tools.
It's about failing to maintain an updated, sound, and sane set of affordances for doing the most important or common work with the least friction possible. To me fixing cruft means making decisions about arranging things well and moving anything that would work better (or less intrusively) someplace else. And, yeah. Removing stuff that simply shouldn't be included. That's the kinds of decisions good developers make.
For me, cleaning up PShop would be like making sure that map of Atlanta is in the right part of the garage. Alongside all the other maps that I "actually use." But which I certainly don't "actually use" quite as much as the salt and pepper or the TiVo remote.
Those? I want those right where I can get to them.
Also in fairness, considering the wide variety of different workflows for which Photoshop is used, dtermining what is a sane set of defaults is by no means an easy task, and prioritizing things per a user's most-used isn't really a solved problem; and there is already the option in PS to customize menus, panes, etc.
That being said, I do think Adobe has lost the plot a bit since they aquired Macromedia (though not to say that Acrobat isn't every bit as bad in its own way as Flash) and from what I know of the company I don't really see them turning around any time soon - I just hope for Pixelmator or similar to get to the point where they can actually compete with Photoshop on a broader level, so that Photoshop actually has some serious competition and they have to start improving it significantly. (Though I should note to the best of my knowledge they're doing fairly well with After Effects, still, which afaik doesn't have any significant competitors.)
But Adobe managed to fork $600 out of me for Photoshop CS3. After a few months their RAW converter stopped working demanding CS4 and my new SLR wasn't supported otherwise. So essentially I feel like they fooled me into renting Photoshop for $600 per year.
Needless to say, if I want to run my purchased copy on Windows (I paid for the Mac version), I'll have to pay for it again, the license covers only one OS.
Oh, and the only software that ever manages to crash my computers into must-be-turned-off-and-on state (I have Linux and a Mac) is Flash. Freezing the entire OS is hard, they surely have an engineering muscle to pull that off.
http://blogs.adobe.com/sarthak/Text_Issue.png
I immediately downgraded back to CS3 and only reupgraded 9 months later, when they finally released an update. Unfortunately, I use Fireworks for all my front-end work and it seems buggier than ever in Snow Leopard.
I've experimented with every app that looks like it could be a potential replacement -- most recently Opacity (http://likethought.com/opacity/) -- with none quite hitting the web design niche that it was able to fill. Usually because it's only one or two guys working on it. Why a company like Panic hasn't tried to take advantage of the obvious demand is beyond me.
I just forced myself to learn and use Photoshop (slices in particular) for web artwork.
I think Adobe is in a tough situation. They can not continue to grow by relying on a few software packages and have been pouring resources into Flash in an effort to turn more into a platform company vs. a software company. They just seem to be working against their culture as their strength has always been in graphics/design software. Most of their attempts at developer-oriented software have never panned out. Anyone remember GoLive?
Additionally, Adobe really doesn't have any pressing need to change. I don't know the specific numbers, but I'm pretty sure GIMP isn't even considered a competitor by them.
But Fireworks does have tonns of annoying bugs.
It crashes occasionally after publishing or test-movieing, but far worse is as soon as I start doing anything stage/library/timeline related I'm almost guaranteed at least a few crashes before I'm done.
I think most of the stability problems he points at arose when integrating Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver into CS. Basically created a split of differing UI standards and buggy software.
I think the single best point made here is that not everyone uses every single feature in every single app. If they could give us quicker access to our oft-used features I'd likely be happier (and they've started addressing this with the new panels structure, I just want some keyboard functions to toggle them now)!
