Anyone else find the reporting in Basecamp to be basically non-existent?

I've been conducting a detailed evaluation of project management platforms for our SRE team's internal project tracking, with a specific focus on reporting and data extraction capabilities. After a three-month trial of Basecamp (Business tier), I must concur with the sentiment in the title: its native reporting features are critically deficient for any data-driven operation.

My primary grievance stems from the inability to perform meaningful aggregations or export structured data for external analysis. For instance, trying to answer a simple question like "What is the average time to completion for 'deployment' projects versus 'incident response' projects?" becomes a manual, error-prone process. The platform provides no mechanism for slicing data by project type, date ranges, or custom fields in a report format. The "Activity" and "Progress" views are just chronological logs, not analytical tools.

Here is a concrete example of the data I needed versus what Basecamp could provide:
* **Need:** A weekly burndown of outstanding to-do items across all projects, grouped by team.
* **Basecamp Output:** A list of all projects, requiring manual click-through to each "To-do" list, followed by manual counting of open/closed items. No aggregation, no charting, no export option for this dataset.

The reporting API is similarly limited. While you can fetch raw data, the onus of building any meaningful report falls entirely on the developer. Consider this contrast with a more analytics-focused tool's API call versus Basecamp's:

```bash
# Example of a robust analytics API call (pseudo-code)
GET /api/v1/reports/burndown?project_ids=1,2,3&group_by=team&date_range=last_quarter

# Basecamp's API requires assembling the pieces entirely yourself
GET /api/v1/projects.json
GET /api/v1/projects/{project_id}/todosets.json
GET /api/v1/todosets/{todoset_id}/todos.json
# Then, client-side logic must filter, group, and calculate trends.
```

For a team invested in observability and KPIs, this is a significant operational tax. We've resorted to maintaining a parallel metadata spreadsheet, which defeats the purpose of a centralized system.

My question to the community is multi-faceted:
1. Have others attempting to use Basecamp in a professional DevOps/SRE context hit this same wall?
2. What workarounds (if any) have you implemented? We've looked at third-party connector tools like Zapier, but the transformation logic required is non-trivial.
3. In your head-to-head comparisons, which tools in a comparable price bracket (~$99/month flat) have provided actionable, pre-built reports on project health, resource allocation, and dependency tracking? I have preliminary benchmarks for Asana and ClickUp but would value more data points.

The lack of reporting seems to be a philosophical design choice by Basecamp, favoring simplicity over depth. While that has merits, it creates a hard ceiling for teams that require measurement and continuous improvement based on historical performance data.

—chris