The same behavior persists through CS5, if it's any comfort. Setting up object styles in a template file (or loading them from a document that already has them) would make it pretty simple. You'd select from the Object Style panel rather than the Wrap panel and Bob would be your uncle. (No offense, Bob!)

There may also be a plug-in for that… :-)

Acrobat 4 format flattens all transparency. Acrobat 5 and 6 don't. Your export may be taking a long time because you have limited memory on your system relative to the amount of image that InDesign/Photoshop needs to process, or you're running out of swap space, or both. If you have several complex, multi-megabyte, multi-layered images on a page, with lots of transparency effects, then the export process can be very slow because all the flattening is being done at export time. Complex vector objects can also take a long time to render, particularly if transparency is involved.

If the later versions of Acrobat seem to “flatten the image too much,” I suspect the problem is with the color space, and it's the color changes that look like flattening. If you export Adobe RGB 1998 to CMYK SWOP v2, you might lost some of the colors of the RGB that can't be rendered in that CMYK color space. You can use InDesign's bulit-in soft proofing to get an idea of what the color will look like on press (View>Proof Colors) in the color space that you are exporting to. I don't know why the different PDF versions would give you different color renderings, though, unless you've changed the defaults for one and not the others. In that case, InDesign would have added “[modified]” to whatever PDF preset you were using.

When you do get a setting that works for you, I recommend you save it as a PDF preset so that you can use it again without having to set things by hand.

I don't think I've ever met a jpg2000 in the wild. It really didn't make it onto anyone's radar, as far as I can tell; the Edsel of image formats.

Can't give you a specific answer except to suggest you re-Place the images and don't embed them. (Embedding images isn't a really good idea, unless you have a very definite reason for doing that. It's so seldom done that I would guess that function has never been thoroughly tested.)

I'd say definitely report this as a bug, since it's reproducible. I can't reproduce it with CS5 in Win7, no matter what version of ID, back to CS2, the template was created in, and no matter how many pages I add, so it may be some kind of interaction between changes in InDesign and changes in OS X. My favorite line from a Star Trek movie: “The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is tae block the drain.” (Montgomery Scott, in “Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock,” explaining why the new Enterprise is stuck in the star dock while the old Enterprise sails away.)

One thing that might ease the pain, since you probably have nothing else in the document with an object style of “[None]” would be to do all the imports then Find/Replace “[None]” with “[Basic Text Frame]” so it all happens in one shot. It'll save you some clicks, at any rate. That said, it's a best practice not to mess with those basic styles (object, paragraph, character) in case you ever need to move content to another document or open one on a different system that still has the defaults. Better to name the style explicitly, then you know you're safe.

I'd say definitely report this as a bug, since it's reproducible. I can't reproduce it with CS5 in Win7, no matter what version of ID, back to CS2, the template was created in, and no matter how many pages I add, so it may be some kind of interaction between changes in InDesign and changes in OS X. My favorite line from a Star Trek movie: “The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is tae block the drain.” (Montgomery Scott, in “Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock,” explaining why the new Enterprise is stuck in the star dock while the old Enterprise sails away.)

In case it isn't clear, here's how you can check the Single Line/Paragraph composer question:

Click inside the story that has this large table.

Press Cmd-A (to select everything in the story).

On the paragraph panel flyout menu, click on “Adobe Single-Line Composer,” which will change everything at once. You don't have to change all the individual styles to test this out, and you probably don't need it for a table anyway.

There was a commentary somewhere, which David talked about a while back, that the paragraph composer, being processor-intensive, could have various side-effects if you leave it on all the time.

Hope this helps.