Houdini is all quaternions under the hood— purportedly to avoid gimbal lock. Houdini’s thing generally is doing things the hard way if there’s any possibility it could lead to a better outcome. Unfortunately, without a (fortunately open source at the free-level) plugin, doing things like rotating a bunch of objects on their own local axes means wrangling the quaternions directly in code.
If you’re interested in seeing their approach, here’s the repo: