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Brooks, I can understand your frustration with the poor quality of the User Agents in current ereaders, but I have to agree with the others - anything that's not designed to reflow is a dead-end. Of course, PDFs can reflow if they're properly tagged and the reader supports it, but then all your careful design gets lost, and footnotes and ornaments go walkabout.
I think the critical thing to remember is that ereaders are still in a state of flux, even if that flux seems glacial at times. In five years' time (hmm, maybe ten...) we'll have much better machines which will render a well-designed epub with much greater fidelity, and have all the advantages of reflowability. Proper justification and hyphenation are a function of processor speed and power usage. Proper footnotes should be coming with the next version of the epub standard, drop caps can already be done with ease in epub.
Yes, you can't change the font-size on paper books, but that's one of the main advantages of ebooks, especially for those with older eyes. Reflowability means you can read the same file on a 4" device and on a 10" one, this makes things easier for both consumer and producer. It might be feasible to juggle different versions for different screens when dealing with a small press, but on a larger scale it would be a nightmare, we already have enough problems with differing ebook formats (though, fair enough, PDF would relieve some of those).
The current epub standard has some well-known flaws (mobipocket isn't even worth considering in this vein), but even so it's capable of supporting a rich design, though frankly I think too much ornamentation sometimes gets in the way of things.
Print still has its uses (it'll be a long time before digital systems can rival the quality and scale of the printing you get in Lenswork), and ebooks need to build on their particular strengths rather than try to emulate the printed word exactly.
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