I think it's probably Stockholm syndrome but I quite enjoying digging into PDFs. There are actually other ways of embedding the text where you have more information to go on. "Characters at coordinates" is a particularly rough hand to be dealt in a PDF (though it definitely happens).
I have been recently writing a library in go to fill out AcroForms, and really, the PDF spec and syntax isn't really that bad or hard to understand. Most everything is a dictonary object. I've seen waaaay worse over-abused OOP monstrosities of a code base in C# and Java
PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2) has been out for a while and supposedly it has eliminated a lot of the cruft from the spec. I just wish it was open like PDF 1.7
