Leaving aside ReporteRs and officer (which I don't have direct experience with), there seems to be a few potential goals for someone selecting a presentation tool:
- Reproducible analysis -- changing a single data point that results in the same general conclusions doesn't require a bunch of copying and pasting updated output
- Polish -- the ability to make a presentation look "professional", for a certain meaning of the word professional that is highly influenced by the existence of PowerPoint
- HTML/CSS free -- because those of us that don't do webdev on the regular can't keep up with the ever-changing best practices
At the moment, I'm not aware of any option that does all three . PowerPoint on its own falls down on 1, and also lacks polish around R code (you would need to use an external code highlighter). When I made a recent presentation about R at my company (which doesn't generally use R), I ended up with an ioslides-based presentation (after trying all of the options that RStudio offers and one or two more), but the more polish I wanted to add, the more I had to dive into the CSS.
I didn't look at xarigan at the time, but that seems to be pretty explicit in the trade-off of using HTML/CSS to get the polish. That said, if I decide to make another PowerPoint-ish R presentation, it may be worthwhile going that route rather than having to hack ioslides apart.
On the other hand, if you're willing to forgo a certain level of polish and stick with what the current frameworks have built-in (for example, presenting the results of an analysis to a client), then they work quite well. They certainly are faster than repeatedly re-creating a PowerPoint as the analysis is updated.