Custom reporting is a major part of requirements management and it's been a topic of much discussion and debate within our team.  We decided early on that one frustration we'd had with other RM and PM tools was custom reporting - many systems that we've used in the past only provided limited filter views for reporting or a few built in reports that couldn't be modified.

Contour is based on an open architecture so users can choose whatever reporting tool they are most comfortable with for custom reports - Crystal, BO, MS Access etc.  The only catch is that many of these tools don't support rich text (HTML) so you'd want to make sure and switch the rich text option "off" and use a standard text box for detail fields. (Tools, Administration, Types, Config).

We provide a 2nd copy of Contour to be installed locally for whomever needs to design reports.  There is no cost for this - it's to enable designing reports without affecting performance of the production system (internal or hosted).  Once a report is created and tested, they can be uploaded to Contour and run via the web-browser.

I agree that our reporting solution (BIRT) is complex, though it's also quite powerful.  We've found that most requirements related reports are quite detailed.

We spent to many hours evaluating everything on the market.  We had the requirement to support HTML text for displaying images, links & tables so we quickly narrowed our options.  It takes a bit to learn the initial concepts, but after creating a couple reports, it "clicked" into palce for me and I really like the designer now. 

We are also continuing to build out our default library that includes often used queries, tables etc that can be dragged onto a report.

We are focusing effort on simplifying the process as much as possible.  We just posted video tutorial's on setting up and configuring the designer and are always adding to our example set of reports.  I'll also mention we offer a very affordable option if you prefer to have Jama develop a custom report - the cost is $250 per report (for a typical report), which I think is quite reasonable.

Let us know if you want to spend a few minutes doing a screen-share on tips and tricks with the report designer.