Quarto's a great tool, but I think it would be hard to maintain it as a reporting solution for a company. My co-founder Adam and I used to love using RMarkdown in our previous job, but found that as we tried to scale that in our team, it became unmaintainable. Keeping the tool limited to SQL, markdown, and components is a way to help data teams maintain a project across a large organization.

We also think that reporting outputs should have a very high bar for visual appearance, and it takes quite a bit of work in Quarto to get charts up to that standard of quality. It sounds like a nice-to-have feature, but in our experience, publication quality data viz is a very important way to build trust with businesspeople who read the reports. We spend a ton of effort thinking through design choices at Evidence and want to give data teams a library of components they can pull off the shelf and write in a simple, declarative syntax.