Thanks for the many comments and answers. I gave Howard Oakley’s site a good read-through last week (knowledgable chap). And the answers, as ever, are perplexing for average users, to say the least!
Howard’s own basic editor/viewer app “Podofyllin” sounds like an interesting option.†
I haven’t tried it yet though, so YMMV. The link below also has the PDF articles he has done for perusal as a simple list:
† FYI, the app’s named after a tree resin used to remove warts, lol!:
So I’m experimenting with PDFKit in another free tool, Podofyllin. To save you reaching for Wikipedia, podophyllin is a pretty toxic resin which is extracted from the roots of the mandrake plant (a favourite in alchemy and witchcraft) and is sometimes used to remove warts. It also happens to contain the letters P, D and F in order. [source]
Quick summation…
So it seems there is basically no clear answer here on best app usage. I suppose things are open to constant change with each app update, contributing to making such hard-and-fast determinations difficult anyway, along with each user’s individual needs & usage.
The things I’ve heard here and elsewhere seem to be:
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Forms: use Acrobat Reader (or Pro, if you have it).
Reader is free at least, and is likely to give the best results when sharing with third parties; they’re most likely to receive form additions/edits intact. -
Full-featured: Acrobat Pro is likely the only (almost) completely reliable software.
If you can afford the ~$180/yr price, or have it as part of a wider Adobe subscription, then use this as much as possible to avoid most faults. However, still no guarantees remain if any other parties the doc is shared with are using other software, and you’re exchanging said doc back & forth between you. -
Basic stuff: use Preview.
Preview is obviously free and included (at least on macOS, if not on iOS), so is OK for basic personal doc use like moving pages around in-doc/between docs, and maybe OK for markups provided they are typically not re-edited again (or at least not often), depending on what markup has been used. More complex stuff is more likely to have problems with, especially on later re-edits. -
Full-featured (non-Adobe): Skim, PDF Expert, PDFpen Pro, Nuance, et al.
Other well-known apps can and often do decent jobs of dealing with edits and markup. But given the different ways each app goes about editing depending on the underlying engine (or version of engine, if they’ve also incorporated additional code to improve/fix bugs in their engine of choice!), they simply may or may not prove effective. So it’s open season, with only trial and error being fruitful.
Not exactly a great state of affairs to be in, if you ask me. But this is not exactly unheard of is it. Other so-called open/semi-open formats like .docx et al. often have the same issues don’t they, where the original format owner (eg. Microsoft) still typically has the most reliable enduring authoring & editing tools. So this comes as no real surprise I guess. 