The complication of PPT led me, with the assistance of LLMs, to design a simple but powerful enough alternative editor of slides based on a markdown format that uses reveal.js as presentation engine https://github.com/juanjosegarciaripoll/quarkfoil
The markdown format is very useful because I can edit the human readable content easily enough and it is easy to get assistance from the LLM in tasks such as designing diagrams, finding typos, completing bibliography, adding paper crops, etc.
This looks nice. In your looking around, did you encounter iA Presenter (https://ia.net/presenter)? I'm a huge fan of their very opinionated way of building a good presentation.
Probably not the best for the types of decks you shared though.
No, I did not dig around into commercial software. I wanted a simple open format precisely because I've had both Libreoffice and PowerPoint break large sets of slides in weird ways.
Good enough for my work as scientist and also as science communicator. Some slide decks from a recent course can be seen here https://juanjose.garciaripoll.com/cern-lectures/
The markdown format is very useful because I can edit the human readable content easily enough and it is easy to get assistance from the LLM in tasks such as designing diagrams, finding typos, completing bibliography, adding paper crops, etc.