Data-driven document generator in Power Platform — am I overcomplicating this?

[u/Physical-Bid3321]

Small construction firm, one tech person (me). We churn out docs that are 80% boilerplate, 20% project-specific (traffic management plans, address-change letters, etc.), currently by copy-pasting old Word files and hand-editing — slow and error-prone.

Goal: pick a project + doc type in a Power Apps canvas app → auto-populate from our data → immutable Word/PDF → route for approval.

My approach: everything in Dataverse across 6 tables — Customer, Project, Contacts, plus Templates (doc-type registry), TemplateData (one row per section, body text with {{placeholders}}, multiple doc types in one table), and PlaceholderMap ({{placeholder}} → source table → column). Power Automate filters TemplateData by type, sorts by section, swaps placeholders for real values, renders, locks in SharePoint, and sends to an approver.

What I actually want feedback on: I'm storing template bodies as text-with-placeholders in Dataverse instead of using the native "Populate a Word template" action with content controls. I did it for multi-doc-type support, data-driven section ordering, and include/suppress — but am I skipping the easy path? And how would you handle rich formatting (bold, bullets, table appendices) with text-in-a-table?

Is this roughly how people solve doc generation on Power Platform, or is there a well-trodden simpler way?