Why does Acrobat add so much of the address into a link.

Question

I work where there are 5 divisions and multiple departments within divisions. I am working on a huge - extremely important project and there are multiple people preparing documents for this project. The work is being done on a shared network drive. The end project will be copied to and distributed on thumb drives.
So our work is going on:
\\xyz-organization\root\division\department\project\first\doc.pdf
\\xyz-organization\root\division\department\project\second\ etc all the way to 90th folder.
Within each document's primary folder is a subfolder called documents that contains every document that will open for a link within the primary pdf.
You would think that all we need is the following part of an address to link these documents....
\first\documents\
and, on 6 team members computers, that's exactly how it works. The 7th team member intermittently works on one of these documents and the entire path ends up in the links. The way this jams us up is that when the folders and documents are copied and pasted on to the thumb drive and given to someone outside the production of the final product... (to someone who is testing all the links), 4 out of the 10 folders and documents, link to the production folder out on the shared network rather than to the thumb drive.
So, how do we get Acrobat to stop using the entire path all the way to the server root consistently? In most web editing software (dreamweaver included), there is a way to set the software to create links relative to the document you're editing, rather than absolute addresses to the location of a file.
Is there a way to fix (the 150 links that are not working, quickly?
Perhaps a plug-in that would clean up Acrobat's mess?
Is there a human that could talk us through this (rather than the person on chat who kept insisting that is was file names even though we have thousands of links that are working properly.... and have done this for other projects without this problem. It's something on either, the software setting, the computer settings...
I am completely frustrated and annoyed with a deadline looming and no help so far.

Answer 1

In thinking about this last night; I still do not understand why Acrobat tech support flat refused to accept that this was an issue and that I
was telling them exactly what was going on. It even seemed that one MVP found it hard to believe, until that person saw one of the files. Why is everyone resisting that this is really an issue, especially when companies buy this software to distribute documents that most likely have to be linked and most likely will be distributed rather than displayed from the location that they are generated from.
Yesterday was an extraordinarily frustrating day. This may be the last time I convince our organization to purchase multiple licenses for this particular software to accomplish a critical task. I think it's probably better to go with one of the e-book publishing software packages.