There are obvious issues, shortcomings and bugs that garner votes, like the artboard size limitations PrintDriver mentioned, since so many people have been frustrated by them.
What doesn’t garner votes are the never-implemented possibilities that people don’t know they need since they’ve never encountered them. For example, the Affinity suite of applications allow users to access features from one Affinity application while still working in another. Glyphs, the typeface design application I use, enables me to easily move anchor points while keeping the control points stationery (incredibly useful for fine-tuning a curve). Also in Glyphs, by default, when an anchor point is removed, Glyphs reconfigures the resultant curve to approximate as closely as possible a smooth version of the original curve. Illustrator, on the other hand, just lets the curve collapse, like a popped balloon.
These and other proposed features rarely garner any attention on Adobe’s UserVoice site, so Adobe ignores them as failing the popularity contest. People aren’t making a fuss about them because they’ve never worked with them to begin with. However, after working in other non-Adobe applications, one begins to realize how useful some features are in these apps that are totally missing or awkwardly and obscurely implemented in Adobe software. Of course there are useful features in the Adobe apps that their competitors don’t have.
Adobe introduces all kinds of new features into their apps all the time, but they fail to address long-standing issues and improvements in favor of things that seemingly have no particularly useful purpose except to niche audiences. I’ve always wondered who at Adobe purposes their new features and how decisions are made to implement them. My guess is that these things are driven by the developers who really don’t use the products in the same way as their end users and who, consequently, come up with things that most designers don’t really need at the expense of making improvements that would be genuinely useful to the majority. For example, I’ve been waiting for 30 years for Adobe to implement a larger continuum of flexible options into Photoshop’s dodge and burn tools than just the pre-configured shadows, midtones and highlights ranges.
I could say just as many, if not more, good things about Adobe software, but it really does seem as though they’ve lost touch with much of their user base.
