Annotating/editing PDF options?

I have google'd phrases like "mavericks pdf preview vs OTHER_SOFTWARE" where OTHER_SOFTWARE was the name of some alternative software to Maverick's built-in Preview app, but the results from those searches have been really crummy. So, I'm turning to the community here. Assuming this isn't a violation for discussing on Apple's forums, can folks please provide some plus's/minus's of using some alternatives to Apple's Preview on Mavericks for annotating and editing PDFs?

Here's some things I've discovered doing some experimentation on my own:

With Preview if I use the highlight tool and save the doc, then if I re-open that doc using other PDF editors/viewers like Acrobat Reader, iSkySoft, and others even on different platforms (e.g. Windows), the highlighted text is extremely dim if at all visible. However, if I highlight using iSkySoft and then open it with other PDF editors/views, it shows up just fine.

I don't know if I'm doing something basically wrong -- it seems like it should be trivial -- but doing find's to search for a string of words varies tremendously depending on the software. With Preview, I can do a search for something like "the house" and if I put it in quotes like that, then it will find only those instances. However, if I try "the h" it will not match to "the house", but instead seems to restrict the search to whole-words only so 'h' has to be surrounded by white-space, punctuation, etc. I'm unable to do a phrase search like that at all with iSkySoft. This seems so basic, so I can't for the life of me figure out if I'm missing something from the user-interface or what.

Anyone else comment on some major plus's and minus's about other PDF editors and their features? I don't mind paying some good money for them, but I expect them to be intuitive to use and feature-rich.