If you can't edit you can't trap, flatten, color convert, profile, possibly even RIP or do any of the things a controllable prepress process requires. Yes, there are borderline insane customers who think they are doing themselves a favor providing you 1-bitt tiffs or locked PDFs. These customers are the same fringe who think those color bars on the marks panel are going to help us print their piece. The same ones who treat you with contempt when you tell them they haven't provided a bleed. The only time it EVER makes sense to provide 1-bit TIFFs to a printer is from another printer itself! This being in the case of a platesetter being down and having plates made by an outside provider guaranteeing the job is RIPed the same way it normally would be thus keeping the process within most of its controls.
If you want your job printed and printed right let the professionals do their job. Do not subvert us, tell us how to do our jobs or prevent us from doing our jobs with locked PDFs and/or pre-rasterized files. The more restrictions you put on a pre-flight or prepress operator the more likely your job is to have problems, the less likely the pre-flight and prepress operators are to be helpful and they aren't going to hear it from sales and management how they need to make x edit, correct x issue or how the job was wrong because they didn't do their job. They might as well ask to come in and run the press too.
