Group home page issues with embedding documents

Is no one able to provide any guidance on this?

MS have no literature about the best utilisation of this beyond a bucket of files with an ugly front page. We are trying to implement this for our projects but don't seem to be getting anywhere fast as we need to have some form of project status displayed - changing the format has proved unpopular with stakeholders so I have little option but to try to implement the current front page Excel document on to a group's home page.

The Group site experience has been lacking (to put it mildly) thus far. Even for a basic user the control you have over the web parts is exceptionally poor (you can't even rearrange them once they're inserted) and the user experience is very inconsistent (though I'm willing to put some of that down to bugs at the moment).

I've tested a BI web part which looks brilliant, but is a departure from the format that Directors are used to so can't be implemented currently. I also don't understand the licensing that might be associated with that - considering it's just being used for pretty tables.

Any advice? Looks like we might just stick with individual Sharepoint Sites for our projects, which is proving to be the wrong approach, imo