After a lot of work, I have been able to work through the Pandoc template formatting to make improvements based on prior work with LaTex templates in CLS.
I find the default Pandoc template to require documentation to make it into something that others can readily and easily modify as it functions from LaTex packages and then the definition of elements to move it towards something typically found in proper typeset documents.
Based on these findings, I believe it now makes sense to consider moving towards Obsidian and markdown for longer documents that do not require the intensity of being scripted in Latex for formatting handled through Pandoc and a good template.
Is anyone else interested in this task?