Completely agree to this statement.
I am also trying to integrate Discourse for an Online program and we use GSuite. The SSO integration was pretty straight forward (after I saw the post).
I found the Data Explorer plugin to be a very useful tool for initial reports. With a good SQL programmer, I am able to get pretty much all the main reports that I want (especially when I want to filter for specific categories and do multiple join statements). We have just started our exploration, but already Discourse is offering so much that it will take us some time to explore them to the fullest. The network graph is one addition that I would like to suggest as a possible add-on feature/plugin for educational institutions.