I'm not sure waht Bob meant by "poorly created," but I understand the old method, and its drawbacks. You can say ID ougt to read embedded images, but it doesn't, and that's not going to change. I have no idea why that decision was made, but I have a lot of confidence that if the task were easy it would have been implemented form the start.
That said, in any layout application there are generally several different ways to accomplish the same end result, and there are tradeoffs between them in terms of file size, interchangeability, and so forth. Two pages might look identical, but due to structural differences from choices made by the designer one may print without issue or convert to another format nearly flawlessly while the other may be next to useless after conversion or cause problems printing. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but not very helpful in a situation like this and all I can say is when making design choices, opting for the simplest solution is usually going to give you more trouble-free results in any application.
