Peter,
One last thought, now that I have had time to settle down and have recovered most of my work and my workflow (of which returning my iPad to Pages 1.7.2 was a big part).
Pages by no means was the best word processor. It missed key features such as indexing, competent grammar checking, bibliography support, etc. etc. These were all obvious potential improvements for Pages 4. But there is one key feature that should be number one on your list and has not been mentioned at all in this discussion.
Steve Jobs became interested in programming after taking a course in calligraphy. His major contribution to the world (I think even if you were to ask him) was bringing that kind of beauty and serenity to the computer. Not the glitzy stuff like special effects, or works-of-art aluminum boxes, etc. But the subtle beauty of a well proportioned font well balanced on the page. The end product of Pages was just more beautiful to look at than any other word processor - it made all of Pages short-comings worth the effort. Even Apple's version of Times New Roman font, 'Times,' was a much more beautiful, serene font to look at. As for me, I can just look at a book and know if it was created in Pages, it looks more professional, it has an inner sophistication most might miss.
"I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating." - Steve Jobs
"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve Jobs
Times was not a completed font, it never got reverse characters like Hebrew right - it would break constantly if you tried to use reverse printed languages. iBook Author was already abandoning 'Times' for this reason. I suspect it became too cumbersome to fix, so out it went, but this was the beginning of the end. (I, myself, would switch to Times New Roman if I needed to do Hebrew). What's being missed in this discussion is that what defines the Mac as a 'Mac' is not Ive's minimalist design, or the collaboration features, or even in the astounding effects... no the Mac DNA lived in Steve Job's understanding of fonts, his understanding of proportion. It's like the difference between Star Wars and Casa Blanca, Pages had achieved a serene quality standard unmatched by any other company. When you bury Job's fonts, you've buried Job's vision, which I might add has also been done with Mavericks when Ive replaced the system font with his own - they purposely, arrogantly, masachistlicly killed off the remains of Steve Jobs... and I think he would agree. Jony Ive, for all his whimsical metaphors, sage-like attitude, and art training, never understood fonts the way Steve did - Ive wrongly interprets this as 'minimalism.' Most won't see it, but it was the fonts that made OSX a wonder to behold and to work on. Pages 5 even if it worked right has become garish, ugly, not only in its 'look,' but in its understanding of the creative process. It's not just about work-arounds, features, etc. It's about becoming almost transparent so that the creative process is unhindered by the technology. Pages 5 is diabolical... it is Screwtape.
There is a perversion going on here - it is almost like someone knew the heart of Jobs, where it lay in Apple, and had to kill it off. Jobs wasn't perfect, none of us are, but Apple should have at least understood what made Jobs great and respected that DNA.
