Hi @paleolimbot -- awesome feedback. I recently had some luck converting Stata users because their dynamic documents are so clunky, and I was able to demo a ton of .Rmd templates from the rticles, rmdformats, hrbrthemes, and pinp packages.
This took a little setting up beforehand, but after clicking 'knit' about 5 times, they were convinced.
Disclaimer: I did teach everyone regular markdown first (a sort of language agnostic reprex lesson for StackOverflow), so .Rmd wasn't much of a leap.