In my experience, the report writer many times is the developer on the team who drew the short straw. So you get this weird effect where the best way to learn the domain is to end up with the least desirable project work (from a dev perspective).
The report was a customer bill, no report, no money.
Yeah, I get any project has tiers, but I have a special hatred for developers who dump on report writers or testers. The developers fancy achievement don't mean a damn thing unless we can get data out of it including billing.
Sadly, a lot of the trouble results from a single rule: if a developer cares about the state of a single item when making decisions, be advised that some report writer is going to have to write a report that shows all of the items in the system with that state.