Well, I strongly feel it is an Apple issue. Granted I should have done more research before I upgraded, but I (naively) thought that Lionwould be another instance of Apple improving their product, and enhancing its capabilities. In this I was wrong. But then why produce an OS that's incompatible with a large block of your user base?
(1) OS-makers set the rules, and it is incumbent on them tobehave in a gentlewomanly/manly fashion. It seems inconceivable that it's in Apple's best interests to prevent Adobe products from working. Yet that seems to be the case here. It's like Bloom returning home in Joyce's Ulysses: it's dark and all the furniture has been moved.
And fellow-software makers should help each other out: when there's a flood in anoffice building (as there is here) everyone drops what they're doing to pitchin.
Maybe this was all a product of a *******-match between Adobe and Apple(recall the PDF support issues on the iPad), but from a users' perspective this is irrelevant. It's the argument that was made in the Financial Times recently about the fall of Netflix: Customers don't give a fig what your internal business priorities are, they want the products that they bought from you to work and be priced well.
(2) The very kludgy work-arounds to this issue, involving deleting or hiding PPDs in the system library (specifically inOS/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/), suggest that what is causing the InDesign CS3.x to crash is minor in nature. I.e. a patch could easily bewritten.
(3) Adobe CS3.x applications are the first generation of "Universal" apps. Okay, maybe their implementation was not ideal (as this shows) but they were written to the rules at Apple laid out for them, rules that are still in place now. As with my first point (1) it's unfair to change the rules on Adobe after the fact.
(4) Who could expect that the step from 10.6.x 10.7.1 (the.1 presumably meaning that some initial kinks had been worked out) would be so traumatic? We are not talking here about a step from Classic or PPC. (I remember these, but because they were structural changes everyone, at some level, was prepared for the change.) This is not about getting Rosetta to work on 10.7.
(5) We are not talking about a minor set of applications here either. Considering the long-standing use of Macs by the design community, in print, production, and photo, the support of Adobe apps should have been aconsideration for Apple. But when you look at the list of issues with this upgrade (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html) it's hair-raisingly long. And note these are CS5.5 apps: the very newest software you can get from Adobe. If part of your argument is that it's incumbent on people to keep their software up-to-date, then here's a set of OS issues that are affecting users of software that was released just this spring.
(6) Even if Adobe CS5.5 was fully supported (see (5)), it's unreasonable to expect everyone to upgrade all of their software packages each time the OS is upgraded (as opposed to completely revised: again, as in (4)10.6.x was not Classic). All of my personal software is up-to date, but I cannot say the same of my clients and my employer: they hold to older computers and software packs as long as they can because the software was so expensive.CS5.5 Design Premium is $1900. For any organization this is a big chunk of cash to doll out regularly. My employer is a non-profit: should they replace their software because I have upgraded my laptop? Or should I stop upgrading my software because they can't afford to get CS5.5 (even if it was properly supported)?
And, what if we buy a new Mac? Presumably this will come with Lion. It's clear with this that this is no longer a $4000 proposition, but a $10,000 proposition, since all the other copies of CS3.x would have to be upgraded.
