That's my point. Other than printing a nice looking form (which includes faxing), the content of the field data is hard to reuse. Searching PDF content on your own hard drive is problematic.

Are there utilities that extract PDF field data and submit it to a database? I'd be grateful to see examples.

What about field validation? The PDF may have some minor validation, but that's no substitute for the validation done in a DBMS.

If you want users to be able to save a nice looking form, you'd still want the data entered online directly into a DBMS. I'd offer a "download PDF of your input" as an option, for example.