Apparently this is normal behavior for hanging characters in Adobe and it certainly is in Quark XPress. I was trying to figure out why right edge was not being honored and IMO its silly to disallow. In the case in hand its a straight quote (used to indicate feet). The whole point of optical alignment/hanging characters is to maintain visual consistency and forcing a line wrap is just maintaining ragged right for the sake of assiduously adhering to ragged right, not about truly maintaining visual consistency.
If for some reason I wished to avoid optical alignment on the right it seems that would be easily handled via setting the right value to 0%. After all, similar reasoning would indicate that a style for left-aligned paragraphs should not be used with right-aligned paragraphs -- but from a change perspective there is a pretty obvious solution: rename 'left' to 'aligned edge' and 'right' to 'ragged edge'. This way the 'aligned edge' would be used on the appropriate side for the selected alignment while allowing those who wished for the possibility of a ragged edged hang to achieve that. For fully justified text the 'aligned edge' is what would be expected to be used on both.
In the end the argument about the behavior in other DTP serves to illustrate that it isn't as outlandish as suggested, is not relying on anecdote, and fundamentally it is hard to see how depriving the person doing layout of tools is a bad thing.
