That pretty much sums up what I think of the practice. It can be useful for pedagogical purposes, when you want to outline the great themes etc. without the students spending too much time on a single work, but not matter how good the abriged version, it stops being the original work as intended by the author, and it loses way too much interest as literature. I don't really see the point of reading a shortened Dumas, Austen, Tolstoy and so on, unless all you seek is entertainment (but in our time, there's movies and tv adaptations for those who don't have the stomach, intellect or patience for literature, I would say). Otherwise, part of the pleasure and interest of reading these books is in the discovery and understanding of how people in those times wrote stories, and tailoring them to fit modern sensibilities defeat the purpose.

We (ie: francophones) don't have much of a tradition of abridging works. at least it's very rare compared to the number of abridged works I see in English bookstores. In the times of classical education, there were such editions because the students were expected to familiarize themselves with many more writers than they could possibly read in full in a year, but even then - as far as I can tell by going through the 200-300 such books my dad kept from the seminary - it was most often not abdrigments so much as collections of excerpts, ie: the best poems of Claudel, the best pages of Proust or Flaubert (it was even more common for the greek and latin writers), and nowadays we get a lot of collections of the most interesting pages from non-fiction writers like St-Simon, Montaigne, Montesquieu. But abridged novels are an absolute rarity, almost non existant.