Gino, you must be an analytically organized person and what you say is true, but working in scale opens the opportunity for error. Error cost time and money and for me, I like concrete numbers to confirm my intent while designing.
As you do something
correctly more and more, the % of error is less. It will never be zero, no matter what you do, but it will be less providing you are doing everything
correctly.
Regardless if doing it in scale or 1:1, the numbers are no less concrete.
I saw some other posts while I was typing this. Part of doing it
correctly is making note of the scale being used, regardless if it's going to a 3rd party or not.
Flexi and Corel offer no such limitations and so when I am working on an 18 wheeler show hauler I am 100% confident that what I see is what I get without factoring any calculations no mater how simplistic the conversion is.
Depends on the target audience of the software. While DRAW and Ai are both general vector creation programs, the bigger customer demographic may be different between the two. Or where the programs happened to find their niche and the respective vendor's started tailoring them to that demographic.
For me this is my standard operational procedure and based on the evidence coming from the overwhelming majority of comments on the Adobe board I feel not alone in my opinion regarding the canvas limits.
Be careful in this regard. Most people go to forums to find issues of problems that they are having, so forums tend to be skewed to a certain perception (which is typically negative as they are there because they have issues). I'm lucky in what I need to do, this is a non issue for me, but that isn't everyone. When I do have issues with something, I either employ a work around (in this case, as others have mentioned, work in scale) or I use a different program that doesn't have that limitation.
When dealing with closed source programs (which tend to have a different mindset with feature integration), your always going to be beholding to someone to get it implemented, so it's not all that strange to have to employ work arounds or go to a competitor's program.
I realize it's a petty request but since I bump into this limitation multiple times a week I am simply expressing my annoyance and trying to rally other like minded people to petition for a change.
It doesn't hurt to do that for sure, but if Ai is
that integral into your design workflow, then I would employ the working in scale workaround just in case. Or relegate Ai to just an "as needed" program (typically for client provided files) and just do all your in house work in a program that doesn't have said limitations. Otherwise, you'll be at Adobe's beck and call if/when they get this feature implemented.
Bare in mind too, we are also talking about mature programs (30 yrs or so), while a feature may seem to be simple, sometimes dealing with the code, there may need more cleaning up then one realizes.