I use Adobe software in production every day. Part of me feels comfort reading other peoples "gripes".
At the same time, as a developer, I also sympathize with the development teams at Adobe. I'm sure many of the people on their respective teams take a lot of pride in the programs they send to market, and undoubtedly they fight many battles with upper-management that they end up losing. "Faster? Who cares about faster, add more features!" the man in the suit says. I speculate that much of the blame for the unreasonable bloat in Adobe applications over the last 5-6 years can be pointed to the people writing the checks. After Effects hit rock bottom on version 7, and only recently with the release of CS3 have things started to look a bit better. After Adobe acquired Macromedia, I'm sure there was a lot of merging they attempted, which so far hasn't been very pretty. Perhaps after another version or two, Adobe will wrangle everything together and start releasing quality software again.
His blog post is nice, he answers thoroughly to most comments there, but this guy seems to be just a lightning rod. There are still no answers why their software is bloated, overpriced, and over-overpriced abroad, why Bridge is such an incredibly annoying and useless (and obligatory) piece of crap, why Reader's performance is even worse than just reasonably bad, why inconsistency in GUI between apps, why silent Opera installation, etc etc etc.
TL;DR: updater sucks, acrobat sucks, prices are too high, focus on stability and performance not bloat, standardize, international customers don't enjoy rape.
To be fair, reader is their only unbearably slow software (seeing as it takes a while to start even on a fast computer). Photoshop/Dreamweaver have had better startup times, for me at least.
There's actually several thousand in their site, but that page only lists the top 100. Unfortunately, their page is also chock full of redundant gripes.
Reader annoyed me to no end, but what I discovered (on a Mac) is that there was (almost) nothing that actually required it. The PDF-ness of OS X meant that Preview was darn near good enough for everything, and faster than a jackrabbit.
At the same time, as a developer, I also sympathize with the development teams at Adobe. I'm sure many of the people on their respective teams take a lot of pride in the programs they send to market, and undoubtedly they fight many battles with upper-management that they end up losing. "Faster? Who cares about faster, add more features!" the man in the suit says. I speculate that much of the blame for the unreasonable bloat in Adobe applications over the last 5-6 years can be pointed to the people writing the checks. After Effects hit rock bottom on version 7, and only recently with the release of CS3 have things started to look a bit better. After Adobe acquired Macromedia, I'm sure there was a lot of merging they attempted, which so far hasn't been very pretty. Perhaps after another version or two, Adobe will wrangle everything together and start releasing quality software again.
Here is a blog post from the Photoshop Product Manager about the dearadobe.com site: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/08/dear_adobe.html