Several people mentioned storing the attributes in the database, then extracting them via a dataset. Barry King has a very nice blog post about this (as a reaction to Adam's article originally being published) here, and we've implemented it at work as described. Works very well, easy to maintain, don't have to touch the reports at all. Only caveat (you'll see it in the comments of the post) is that in header/footer areas you need to map the dataset value to a parameter, but that's simple enough.

We actually created a template for the team that includes the style dataset and header/footer elements (like logo, dept header, report name, global rundate, page numbers, confidentiality notice, etc) so that team members creating new reports don't have to do a thing in order to implement the default style. Saves a ton of time.