What was the point of creating the "canonical form" if you already had reports being generated in-app? Was it just someone's pet project, or were there supposed to be other benefits?
There wasn't even a lot of transformation going on. It was just... strange. I witnessed some true eldritch horrors like Python calling R calling a shell script that called the mysql client, which wrote data to a temporary file that was eventually read by the great-grand-parent python script.