To be fair, Adobe DOES employ Evangelists like Alan Partridge and Pooja Jaiasingh. They create quite a few blogs and video tutorials. But most of these are focused on new features of the latest app, not general knowledge. They leave that to all the people out there making a living teaching Captivate in classes.
A few years back (I think it was for Cp5) Adobe DID in fact pay a professional e-learning developer to build training videos for them. But of course those same videos would need to be rebuilt year after year as each new version of Cp comes out. That translates into quite a few dollars for each release...and I'll bet Adobe tracked exactly HOW MANY people viewed those videos and did some math to see if perhaps there was a much cheaper way. E.g. Let other people do it for you!
I agree that it would be great if Adobe provided a lot more instruction, and I personally would LOVE to see far more doco about the deeper aspects of Captivate's API etc. I'm also Technical Author who has worked creating and maintaining online help. So, I am well aware of the shortcomings of Captivate's Help doco. Sadly, it's the same story across the software world. The owners and bean counters in software companies don't see the same value in Help doco as the end users do (and end-users don't usually see much value there AT ALL). Most software companies would rather employ another programmer to add yet another enhancement to their already feature-encrusted application than to hire a decent Techwriter to update their Help.
The reason is simple: People BUY or UPGRADE apps BECAUSE they have new features. They EXPECT the help doco to be useless anyway. Follow the money.
Like most software companies, Adobe is very aware of ROI. They've worked out that nobody reads the Help doco anymore. This is partly because HELP has become known as a chronic mis-nomer. But it's also because most people are too lazy to trawl through hundreds of pages of doco looking for an answer when they can just throw up a question on the User Forum for the same app and get an answer within minutes or hours...without any extra work on their part.
So the modern User Forum has become the de-factor HELP system for thousands of apps. Think about it from the software company's viewpoint: Thousands of unpaid support people falling over each other to help their peers and feel useful. It's a dream solution.
And, if you look at your own issues with Captivate...isn't this Forum where you found most of YOUR answers? So, all you've just done is convinced Adobe their 'strategy' is completely sound. Only when people STOP buying Captivate BECAUSE of the lack of Help will Adobe change that view.