An Appeal to Apple about the new iWork release

Question

I start with a quote from Jason D. O'Grady at ZDNet written in the beginning of this year:
"Apple is missing a prime opportunity here and basically ceding the market to Microsoft. Its users have a natural aversion to Microsoft products -- at least on the OS level -- and it's baffling that Apple isn't capitalizing on it with regular updates to iWork. Apple could simply add a couple of features, tighten up the UI and release iWork '10, iWork '11 every year (like almost every other software developer does). I know that I'd probably upgrade.
Instead Apple proceeds with its release and abandon strategy."   
Why did Apple released this new iWork-version to us serious users? I love my iWork '09 and its truly intelligent and useful interface which has speeded up my workflow tremendously compared with using MS Office.
All users of a program expect that the next version will at least be as good and useful as the previous one, that features have been improved, useful stuff added, improvements leading to an even better and efficient workflow have been added etc. etc.
iWork could have been an important piece in increasing the market share on Macs worldwide and a fantastic alternative to MS Office that most of us are so tired of because of its lack of intuitiveness, poor-working word-formatting and layout-functions etc. etc.
I have been using iWork professionally for years now. The new version is not an alternative for me. It would ruin my iWork-work for years including my business as a technical writer.
I appeal to Apple:
Call the new iWork version for ’iWork Lite’ or ’iWork for beginners’.
Announce an iWork Pro-version as soon as possible and give an estimation of release date.
Let iWork ’09 be the minimum baseline for the version.
Assure a good backwards compatibility.
Do not change the basic interface compared with iWork ’09 with for example its customizable toolbar and floating inspector.
Give it a competitive price (compared with MS Office).
Give it great cloud functionality (greater and better than MS Office)
We all need better programs that Microsoft offers us.
You guys at Apple have been on track to make it. I appeal: Switch over to this track again! Today!
Regards,
Kim
A serious user of Apple-products

Answer 1

Felix Leiter wrote:
I disagree. The floating inspector was very useful as you could keep it away from the writing area, pull it off competely when not needed and call it back on request. At least, this should stay as an option rather than that invasive new sidebar.
I agree. Having the movable Inspectors was one of the best features of iWork. The way it was implemented with the descending order of tabs should have been widely adopted. Not trashed.
I keep my Inspectors and other palettes on a second monitor to allow a full view of my work on the first.
Having an independent Inspector, one not tied to context, allows the User to look for information and options without losing what you are doing at the moment.
Contextual linking suffers from a major problem. You must know the exact selection/combination of actions to make the controls appear. In other words you must know the correctly worded question to get the answer.
Don't get the wording of the question exactly the way the programmers want it and you will never find the answer.
There are examples of that in Pages 4.3, other Apple software and many areas of OSX in recent times.
It is very bad User Interface Design to conceal the access to solutions.
Effectively you turn the software into an Easter Egg hunt. Something that seems to amuse the personalities who program, but not those who are using software to an end and not just playing games.
Peter