Is anyone successfully using Figma Slides as a day-to-day deck building tool?

I work for an agency and am working on formalizing our deck building process—primarily for pitches, not project work. We have traditionally used Figma design files to build decks but there's a desire for something a little more straightforward so folks like strategists and researchers can build simpler, quicker decks in a way that's more familiar to them than the full Figma design tool.

I'm struggling to grasp if and how we can successfully utilize a design library we've built out with color, typography, and spacing variables, text styles, etc. inside Figma Slides.

Here are some of the main issues I'm running into...

• Seems as though color variables basically need duplicate values in the Template Style in order to use them in both Slides mode and Design mode
  • There's also no organization available in the Template Styles the way you typically would have in a design file (eg. Neutral/White, Neutral/Black, etc.)
• There's no way to edit the library where all the variables and styles are coming from
  • I can see why it's that way, idea being once you have your template you don't want people messing with it
• Layout Grids are not included in the styles available from the library, so an update to the library would not update in the Slides template

In general, the biggest issue is the connection with the library from our design file. Seems like it might be better to just build a Slides template from scratch rather than trying to make that work. But I also haven't figured out how you can even edit master slides from an existing template...

If someone has found a way to make it work I'd love to hear about it!