Is typesetting this difficult?

I am not going to name the journal, or the publisher, but I have just had a very frustrating experience.

I was fortunate enough to have a paper accepted recently and we got to the point where the journal asked me to submit the final set of files so that they could typeset the article.

The paper had quite a few tables in and the journal wanted the final submission to have the tables presented on separate pages, along with a list of the tables. Fortunately, using various latex packages it was not too difficult to do this, although not all Latex packages play nicely with each other and it does take some experimenting.

My frustration though, is what is the publisher going to do with these PDF pages, full of tables, when I also have to submit the source file (i.e. a tex file). Surely, they will construct the tables from the latex files, not use the PDF pages I have supplied?

Another thing they wanted was the text (just the text, not figures or tables) to be sent in single column, double spaced, when the paper (until now) had been two column, single spaced. Again, not that difficult to do with latex but why do they insist on it?

There were a few other things that they needed that, to me, seemed a little redundant.

I can understand that, sometimes, this level of detail might be necessary but surely if the document is written in latex then the publisher can (should) be typesetting the paper using the latex file? Asking for all this other stuff, to me, seems redundant. But then again I am not a typesetter, or a publisher, so maybe there is a good reason?

Anyhow, the important thing is that I have a journal paper accepted!