Kathryn,
Many people are just like you, they believe that printing and reporting is simple, and it might be in your particular use case but the problem for developers like me is that though your use case might actually be simple developing a widget that will handle and be configurable for every GIS flex user around the world that will possibly want to use the widget and have it do something a little different or more complicated, turns out to be a complete nightmare. I just thought you would like to know from a developer perspective why there is not widgets out there that do reporting and not many that do printing well either. There are just to many data and end user dependent variables.