I agree. The purpose of plans is to transfer information about design intent for specific construction outcomes. Years ago, this was done by paper because there was not another efficient option. For the last few decades, this hasn’t been necessary, but we still produce paper products. Now roadway and earthwork folks tend to lean on digital models, but that’s after bidding and only for a handful of items. There’s “BIM” but nobody can actually tell you in concrete terms what that is.
I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.
To add to the agreement chain: completely concur that models > printed projections of these. Dropping to a paper based form will always result in information loss. The challenge is paper / pdf's are ubiquitous. Tools in the CAD space are built around vendor lock-in with non-trivial license costs. As a result there still needs to be a way to distribute that detail to all the people involved in delivery.
I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.