Why would a printer not want to receive a layered PDF?

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CONSUMER CONVENIENCE RULES is a mantra marketing agencies use.
If you make it difficult for someone to get their work printed they will go to another printer and you have lost that customer forever.
However all of the extra prepress work has to be paid for and again if you make it expensive for someone to get their work printed they will go to another printer and you have lost that customer forever.
Many shops accept these FACTS and add a small extra margin to every job and hope to cover costs on the swings and roundabouts principle.
I have worked in underfunded shops where the RIPs will not handle layered PDFs and so you manually open them in Acrobat and manually select the layers you want printed.
While it is nice to have up-to-date kit it is, in my experience, rare.
I do prepress cover for a large number of clients in the UK and so see both ends of the investment spectrum.

 

[davarino]

Some people just don't like change. I still have people that insist on sending me version 1.3 PDF's because it worked well 15 years ago.

Some people just don't need extra bells and whistles.

When a software company sets up new interfaces, adds new bugs (unavoidable), and adds confusing terminology, it becomes learning-curve time... and many of us would rather do the simple things we have done dependably in the past rather than lose a third of every day relearning how to thread a needle.

Backwards compatibility is, regrettably, destructive of profit margin to sellers and writers of software. As long as we have behemoth software enterprises, we will have a few new features with every release and maximum pain. (Planned obsolescence.)