Layout break
Pages 2009 had a very neat trick. You can insert a layout break anywhere on your page and change the column structure. This gave the page layout a great flexibility, e.g. you can have a broad title at the top across the page, followed by a synopsis for an article again across the page, then the article itself in two column form. You can employ the same trick to add a large photo or illustration, then regain the two column format. In layout mode, and in other layout applications such as "InDesign" you employed text boxes to achieve the same effect.
This unique feature is now absent from Pages 5.3, and the only way I can achieve the same effect is to create an one-cell table across the page and fill it with whatever text format you like. Awkward. (Of course, you can link a picture to the text or to the page). If the "Layout Break" feature is buried somewhere in the application, can someone please point me to it? It is not obvious.
While I like the new UI feature of selective inspector, its layout for some functions is far from obvious or logical. You certainly have to do a lot of 'sniffing around' in the new Pages. The overall feeling of this community, I gather, is that we are all looking forward to a "Sensible" Pages 5.
