I completely agree.

A good demonstration of this is the surprising way John Irving chose to "abridge" his novel (the cider house rules) for the screen, and insisted to do it himself. He didn't just cut stuff nor tried to keep all the plot elements, he rewrote the story so what he considered the core of his novel, its main themes and elements, fitted in a much shorter format.

He thought "abridged versions" sucked, that how a story is told by a novelist matters a lot, and if he needs to the make the story shorter, he would tell it quite differently, not just cut here and there. The result was quite unfaithful to the novel if you look at the plot aspect only, but it's the only adaptation of his works that felt like a John Irving story and had coherent themes and storytelling - and it was surprising what he chose to cut, to keep and to tell differently.

Of course this was also done in a different medium, but the principles are the same. If told they must shorten their novel, most authors won't just excise material, paragraphs and chapters, and get rid of scenes dealing with side storylines as all abridged version does. They'll do often massive changes and rewrites.

In the old days that's how writers did it, when a work couldn't reach a contemporay audience anymore for all sort of reasons. They didn't abridge, they wrote a new work based on the earlier one. Some of those retellings became literary classics on their own, which will never happen to one of those modern abridged versions that pretend to respect the original writer by butchering his work. Keeping the original title and the name of the original author is a travesty.