Thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts. I'd be interested to know whether there are any other guidelines or formal documentation from your SAS Global Professional Services Enablement and Learning team.

Interesting thoughts on the report design process... Personally I feel that the beautification and report/design layout are worth considering early on in the process. Having a theme in place as a basis to build reports from and a design for the information flow could help reduce potential rework later down the track as Tricia Aanderud and I discuss some of these aspects in our SAS Visual Analytics dashboard SAS Global Forum 2014 paper, http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings14/1247-2014.pdf

I think the point you make about the importance of layering at report, control and object level are good to keep in mind. It reminds me of a post/discussion I had within the online SAS Visual Analytics community with building more stylish/infographic type reports https://communities.sas.com/docs/DOC-6852#comment-4226