>In, ~50% of cases our reports are run from a wrapper (a report generator utility used at application level which presents users with a list of reports for a specific applications, a list of 'filter' conditions applicable to any of the reports, preview/print options, can run report specific code before and/or after the report, etc.). For those cases it would be easier to implement the solution you suggest - except... we still have to modify every report.

"Modify" doesn't have to mean you have to issue "modify report" n times.
You can hack the frxes programmatically, by adding "+left(str(_pagetotal,10,0),1)" to the first string expression you find in the expr field, and then just compile the report and you're done.