OK, so the problem is not with the PDF format… some work for McNeel then… 
Well, for many years we ran our Epilogs exclusively out of Rhino with the Epilog printer driver - no intermediate PDF involved. It works very well. I have a colleague that has a Trotec and they do the same - it is possible that they have to go through Trotec’s intermediate Job Manager to send it to the laser instead of directly as we did with the Epilogs.
We used Rhino as the importing software and specified that the students had to bring in DXF’s as a standard format for their laser work. The DXF’s came from anything from AutoCAD to Vectorworks to ArchiCAD to Rhino.
Yes, in this case it doesn’t matter much, you are not doing precision machining and the accuracy of the PDF is probably much better than the actual laser-cut part can be.