Well, Adobe Reader is a viewer, not an editor (that’s Adobe Acrobat). For light editing like rotating pages I’d recommend the free version of PDF-XChange Editor: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor (Persistent rotation is on the “Organize” tab.)

It’s easy for Apple because they don’t sell a competing product. Adobe has to balance providing a useful free viewer against a paid editor (or payed extra functions). There’s certainly a lot I’d like to see improved/included in Adobe Reader, but I also recognize that they are in a different market position than Apple.

If someone hands me a stack of papers to read and half of the pages are upside down, I consider orienting the pages so they all have the text right-side-up to be part of reading it. I understand Adobe doesn't have hardware sales to prop up their software but I think it's pretty unreasonable to charge $15/month to rotate pages within a document.

They do let you fill in forms and comment in the free version, even though that's not strictly speaking under the definition of "reading".

I'm currently rotating pages by sending them to my iPad and using Documents by Readdle. Not sure if that's part of the free features or because I bought their PDF Expert and some of the PDF editing capability gets shared across apps.

Yeah, I'm not going to argue about that particular feature -- I mean Adobe Reader does allow you to rotate the page display for viewing purposes, just not in the way you'd prefer -- but the broader perspective is that Adobe roughly differentiates between authoring a document and using a document -- authoring is what costs money. Form fill-in is not authoring, and under the hood it's actually more similar to commenting/highlighting (adding stuff "on top" of the normal page content), which are also reader/viewer functions.

So my real problem here is the disconnect between Adobe's "rotate view clockwise" being a document-wide operation, and the fact that actual PDF documents don't have consistent page orientation throughout.

It's usually that all of the pages are consistently oriented as portrait, but some of them actually have landscape content.

The incorrect portrait page orientation was probably done on purpose to keep printers from screwing it up, and rotating a piece of paper to look at it barely requires a thought. No big deal if you're printing it.

But the ease of looking at a single page sideways and then going back to the original rotation doesn't map to reading it on a computer screen with document-wide rotate commands, and they really should've sucked it up and let me fix individual pages. Even if it's a temporary "view" change and not something I can save back to the file.