It is very difficult to know what the problem could be. Make sure you’re viewing this with Acrobat (not a third-party pdf reader). Check to see if it works in the SWF Preview panel. (It’s not SWF, but that’s a good indicator of if something is broken.) Make sure you have all the little eyeballs turned on and off properly in the Buttons & Forms panel. It’s easy to miss one there.

The panels normally do stay open, but if they’re not for you, go to Preferences (it’s in the InDesign menu on the Mac, not the Edit menu), and turn off “Auto Collapse Panels” in the Interface panel.

To make InDesign less “transparent” select View > Application Frame.

You exported as IDML, closed the original, and then opened the IDML file. Did you get the error when you opened it, or when you tried packaging?

Have you tried packaging other files? Perhaps your Package feature is broken? Have you tried rebuilding your preferences?

Not sure if its possible to do what you want with the built-in conditional text. Our conditional text expert is Kelly Vaughn, who found this great option:
https://creativepro.com/finally-conditional-text.php

The key word here is: Preview. Mac OS Preview doesn’t handle interactive PDF very well. Try it in Acrobat.

I heard from Justin Seeley that Mavericks works with CC as long as you uninstall the Creative Cloud application first, then upgrade to 10.9, then re-install the CC app. Hm. Hope that gets fixed soon.

Shared hyperlinks aren’t the end of the world; they’re annoying for various reasons, especially if you need to edit one repurpose your document later.