I've looked into the XBRL data - it's closer to an XML version of each company's 10-K rather than a unified accounting/reporting system for all public companies

I've looked into the XBRL data - it's closer to an XML version of each company's 10-K rather than a unified accounting/reporting system for all public companies. If one company reports their income statement using 20 lines and another uses 15 lines, the XBRL data will show both exactly as they appear in the 10-K and they would not be comparable (unless your software can understand that "Net Interest Expense/(Income)" for one is the same thing as the sum of "Interest Expense" and "Interest Income" for the other). To add to that I've found some companies are filing XBRL is a non-conforming XML standard (probably software issues) and some companies just include the last 3 years of data in every XBRL document (rather than just picking the same data that's reported in the 10-K), making the consumer figure out what is the actual new information in the document.