Reports in Gnucash 2.4

[Colin Scott]

And the answer is as follows:

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I'm afraid the gnucash developers won't do anything about this. The reports
were improved by some people who contributed them, but the choice of the
indentation was up to the contributor. There hasn't been any formalized
requirements for one or the other form of indentation. Hence, I wouldn't
consider this a bug.

That being said, feel free to submit and discuss changes to the reporting code to get your preferred indentation into there.
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To which I replied:

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I accept what you say, and accept that I am unlikely to change your view, but believe the attitude behind your response to be very shortsighted.

Reporting is by far the weakest aspect of Gnucash's core functionality, and many users find they need to export data from reports into Excel or other programs in order to format and/or enhance the data simply in order to make Gnucash fit their requirements.  It makes it much more difficult for them if the actual structure of the output data continually changes for no good reason.  (We have already  been through this cycle - it used columns, it stopped using columns, it used columns again - a couple of years ago, and for all I know also before that.  Failing to maintain any kind of consistency of output (and not even maintaining consistency within the output structure!) makes extra - and unnecessary - work for your users, and discourages them from making a full commitment to Gnucash.  Were there a proper report writer available this would not be such a problem, but reports currently an essential mode of exporting data from Gnucash for home-brew reporting systems.  In the absence of a
ny other sensible method for a non-technical user to generate reports then the availability of well-defined basic reports, with a well-defined and stable output format, seems a not unreasonable user expectation.

However, accepting that I am crying into the wind here, would it be possible at least to make available historical versions of reports, so that the user can make up his own mind whether or not he wants to accept debatable "improvements"?
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Colin