Placing a 4.2 mb JPEG in Illustrator document (with little or no text or vector art) results in a file size of over 40 mb. Adobe dismisses this as "expected behavior" and closes the case with no effort to fix an obvious problem.
An Illustrator document with 47 mb of placed JPEGs and nominal text and vector art yields a 513+ mb document! An 18-page (1-side print) PDF produced from this document was 523 mb. WAY too big to send via e-mail or FTP, the client had to come to my office with a thumb drive and download it from my iMac.
While I can understand a few mb of bloated coding in the Illustrator or PDF formatting, perhaps a 50 or even 80 mb file, half a gigabyte is f*cking inexcusable.