That said, like you, I prefer the Acrobat Reader 2017 product from a usability perspective, but I have to think about what might happen in our org as well, we don't currently use any of the Document Cloud services other than a single subscription to the ExportPDF (as word,excel, etc.) feature, but we may scale up (especially with GDPR looming), especially if we want to control the security aspects of PDFs we might send outside the organisation with cloud managed policy.
I feel in a similar situation, the longevity of the product is one of the criteria I am also thinking about, especially considering from the lack of documentation the desktop product seems to be not a focus for Adobe. Join Garrick Chow for an in-depth discussion in this video, Understanding the differences between Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader DC, part of Learning. See here for all the different registry configurable items.
The Standard version is the lighter version of the Acrobat with all the necessary features you’ll find in the Pro version with the exception of preflighting documents, creating PDF portfolios, forms authoring, creating actions, and more. Like I said, I only started working on this today, and I need to find more info on what can be controlled using registry in this version as the focus for Adobe appears to be the DC product. Adobe Acrobat comes in Standard and Pro versions along with a cloud version called Adobe Acrobat DC. It looks like if you are running at Cloud Cadence and adopting a lot of cloud services (in Microsofts lingo) then you'd be best looking at DC, for my org we don't use public cloud services, hence why I'm looking at Adobe Acrobat Reader 2017 as the base, and then likely look at deploying updates using WSUS and Local Publising to publish the Adobe Updates through my on prem WSUS. I'm trying to find some more information on what Registry controls work, as some of the ones for Acrobat DC that should control the online services don't appear to work. Features can be controlled using Windows Registry.
The base execuatble can be unzipped as an msi for Group Policy Software Installation then cumulative updates are delivered using.This version has Group Policy Administration Templates available (that don't do a lot if truth be told).I've started to test Adobe Acrobat Reader 2017 today after discovering it's existence on Adobe's Public FTP sit (coincidentally the only place you can get it from) If you dont have an installation CD you can download the software to the new computer, but only if you purchased Acrobat directly from Adobe.