Oh for sure. PDF is tough for so many reasons. Remember that article about the apple programmer trying to implement the "fit text to screen width" thing for PDF a couple months back? PDF is sooooooooo challenging as a medium. Even something that reads and looks identical, but is different under the hood could be big improvement, apparently (I don't actually know how PDF works under the hood other than hearsay of "it's difficult"). In the spirit of chesterson's fence, maybe not though.

I totally agree that additional media could be good. I got caught up on the "most papers could be compressed to < 50 lines" line and misunderstood the premise you were presenting.