Hi @Craig, I completely agree. I still use pandoc here sometimes, mainly with eisvogel template, but it always messes up with embedded plugins like charts and drawings.
On one hand the core PDF export tool from Obsidian works very well with good visuals but it is not configurable. Pandoc lets us configure almost everything but the current implementation is a little fragile (small changes lead to cryptic error messages) and doesn’t support plugins well (at least on my tests).
So I’d love to see the core PDF export tool supporting headers and footers, for example. Maybe asking for cover and TOC pages is a little too much…