Has there been an explanation for Pages 5 crippling?

I am not sure that there is an official announcement of the reasoning here, but it is pretty clear what is going on.

Pages versions 1 through 4 (and Numbers 1 and 2) were an evolution of computer productivity applications and Pages 4.3 and Numbers 2.3 continue to work in that capacity.

Apple, however, sells far more iOS devices than computers, so Pages 5 and Numbers 3 were released as companion applications to the iOS versions. As such, if the Mac versions supported too many of the features that do not fit with the capabilities of an iPad, it would only serve to emphasize the inherent limitations of the iOS platform, and would lead to translation problems when moving documents back and forth between iOS devices and Macs. Interoperablilty dictates designing for the lower common denominator.

I would not expect a new version of Pages for the Mac to ever approach, let alone exceed, the capabilities of Pages 4.3. If, however, you found Pages 4 to be a "very usable wordprocessor," there is no reason, at least in the short term, to stop using it.

This discussion, among others, lists features missing in Pages 5.

Apple's page about the new iWork for Mac states "These applications were rewritten from the ground up to be fully 64-bit and to support a unified file format between OS X and iOS 7 versions" & "In rewriting these applications, some features from iWork ’09 were not available for the initial release."

I guess that's as "official" as you'll find.

That is pretty well it in a nutshell.

We are all in Limbo waiting to see what Apple does next, but we have just seen what it has done to its users and their work and based on that alone, it would be inadvisable to let them control your business.

They don't even think of what happens to their users.

Peter

Yes, I actually called Apple almost screaming with rage and disappointment. They quietly informed me that I could go back to my older version. It seems they've decided to keep Apple light, to dumb it down for the ipad and iphone, their bread and butter. But those of us who use Macs for art, for layout and design, AND in our offices, are apparently being forced into the unloving uncaring arms of Microsoft for any serious software.

There are many serious word processors for the Mac and a few page layout applications. If Pages '09 no longer meets your needs, there are still plenty of non-Microsoft choices.

The situation regarding Numbers is more troubling, because Numbers offers an unconventional concept of a spreadsheet application. There are alternatives to Excel out there, but the ones I have seen follow the Excel model of a single monolithic table for each sheet, unlike the Numbers model, where each table is only as large as it has to be and each sheet can have multiple tables. If there is anything else out there that follows the Numbers model (and, hopefully, that has AppleScript support) I would love to hear about it.

Because I do biggish projects which have to work with Adobe Indesign, my ultimate word processor is Word. But because there are certain bugs for Mac in Word, I've been working in Pages & exporting to Word. Is there another app that has the flexibility of Pages 2009 as to export etc? That has the sidebar showing search results? (Word doesn't work on BIG searches; Pages does.) Fortunately for me I still have lovely Pages 2009 and can finish my current project. (Excel works fine for my needs, thank goodness).