One of my favorite image viewing and correcting softwares is Irfanview. It's not a full blown editor, but it does everything else you could imagine, extremely lightweight and it very very fast! Oh yeah, it's also free.

I've been using this software for many years, and only recently found out you can open PDFs with it. It absolutely blew me away how quickly it did this as well compared to Adobe!

I honestly don't know why anyone uses Adobe acrobat for anything - reader or the editor. PDF is an open standard.

Plenty of open source software does a decent job of making PDFs - Libre Office for example. And if you have Microsoft Word then you can export documents to PDF without issue; or you can use Print to PDF tools too

Its unlikely any office environment doesnt already have licenses for Microsoft Office so just bin Acrobat and direct people to use office. And if you're not paying for office then why are you paying for Acrobat?

What is a good alternative for saving fillable form PDFs as a flat file or image? I've been using ~~openoffice~~ libreoffice draw for editing PDFs recently but every method I have come across seems like a workaround rather than a feature, while adobe can do it with a click.

Even if you did edit them, there are better tools than Acrobat.

The only thing I use acrobat for is for converting pdf’s to other formats. Why reader can’t do that I don’t know.

What would motivate someone to insist on having software he doesn't use?