But our marketing team uses PhotoShop (or some equivalent, but I’m fairly sure it’s really PhotoShop) to generate advertising materials. Then they’re converted to PDF for electronic distribution in addition to being physically printed for slick handouts at trade shows, etc.
Our documentation department generates Word docs which are manuals for our various products. Each product has several manuals for the various audiences. All of these get converted to PDF for distribution, both as paper and as downloadable bits.
In each case Acrobat is not used for much beyond simple convert-print-to-file. But they tell me there’s almost always some tweaks applied in the Acrobat layer. Unsurprisingly, more tweaks from the Word docs than from the PhotoShop output.
As a research scientist, I use Acrobat all the time.
When we exchange documents with co-workers and collaborators, PDF is the most convenient format. Acrobat Pro seems to be the standard tool for annotating PDF files (e.g. proofreading and commenting on documents).
We archive technical drawings and other documents as PDF, because we can’t count on our co-workers to have the same software used for generating them (e.g. CAD, math packages).
And perhaps most importantly, papers and proposals are usually submitted as PDF. For a simple research paper, a freeware PDF generator might be OK. But putting together a 100-page proposal as a single PDF, parts of which come from different sources (quotes and CVs received as PDF, main document written in LaTeX, budget section from Excel, etc), Acrobat Pro is a great tool.
In hotels PDFs really took off in the early 00s. Most hotels don’t use Adobe because you can find cheaper PDF suites. Prior to that most hotels were using the proprietary formats that came with their point of sale systems or front office systems.
As hotels merged and bought each other off PDFs became the way to easily exchange formats without having to buy a new front desk system.
I use both of them heavily in writing technical documents and manuals. Photoshop to edit, manipulate, and merge images and graphics. Acrobat to consolidate and publish the document from various export files from other software suites.
Admittedly, Photoshop is probably a bit of overkill for the kinds of graphics I create, but I’m so familiar with the interface that I can use it more efficiently than other graphic editing apps.