Both of your thoughts line up with mine, which is a good sign.
I talked about quality control with my supervisors. Not much of a response. (What do you mean?) Makes sense: the grunt work will be mine to worry about. It is also pandemic season, so probably no free grub; even if there were, my allergies would not allow sampling on my part. Time is not on our side either.
Their reason being that I should let people send it the way they are most comfortable with doing because of low computer literacy and ease of submission on their part. I suppose I could ask again.
Data and layout separation: I was looking into that for Publisher this morning. Catalogue and ([e-]mail) merge are the operative terms here. The data and links would be documented in an Excel spreadsheet for Publisher to retrieve. My remark about PowerPoint was done in jest but someone seriously told me to consider that over Publisher. I did try to open the door for more possibilities by name dropping open-source and proprietary applications, but it seems we have settled on Publisher ATM.