Why DBCollect

Question: Why can't we just send some AWR reports? AWR reports are great but have a few problems and limitations for our purpose:

We need AWR reports with a consistent format (HTML, single instance, correct timezone) and over a long period (default 10 days, with a standard 1-hour interval this results in about 240 AWR reports per database instance)
We need the AWRs for each database instance. DBCollect detects all instances automagically (in most cases). The alternative is to manually start SQL*Plus for each instance and generate all reports
AWR only provides performance and limited configuration metrics. There is no database size/config information such as sizes of tablespaces, redo logs, temp files, segments, ASM disks/diskgroups, archive/flashback/bct files. DBCollect runs additional (SELECT) queries to get this additional database information
No OS configuration or hardware information (such as CPU type & model)
No disk/network configuration
No UNIX SAR/sysstat performance data
No compression, backup, archiving details
AWRs are sometimes generated using non-English locale (cannot be parsed)
AWRs are sometimes generated in txt format instead of html (hard to parse, error-prone)
AWRs are sometimes provided as RAC versions (completely different layout, hard to parse)
Usually only a few AWRs are provided, sometimes with a very large interval (many hours or even days) which is not detailed enough to do accurate sizings or performance analysis
No way to know if there are other instances on the same system for which we need to know details

DBCollect/Why