well so far the options have a been a little disappointing, CDR reporting software seems pretty lacking in this area, at least for what my clients needs are. My research has revealed the following, feel free to correct any observations if they are wrong...
CDR-stats - looks good but doesnt appear to satisfy points 1,2 or 3 listed in my original post, also it will need installing to its own server as it wont install to Centos 5. Not a big deal but something to note.
Asternic CDR reports - great if you want Call Centre inbound reports but I can find virtually nothing on the CDR reports version other than a little info, certainly no screenshots. After further searching it seems the CDR version is free, but not exactly much more than the current CDR version used on Elastix. Again it doesnt satisfy points 1,2 or 3 in my original post.
Queuemetrics - Call Centre stats, not what I need.
SamReports - I really want to like this one as it looks good, but after going through the screenshots I am quite confused by the layout. It looks like fancy pivot tables. again not sure this can satisfy points 1,2 or 3.
Thats about it in the offerings for CDR reporting, so next I looked at alternatives.
it seems the CDR records in asterisk are stored in a Master.csv file , so I pulled a copy out and realised its propbably just as easy to learn how to use pivot tables in Excel and figure out your own stats. So I am looking at that as a temporary option just to get bespoke reporting that I need.
But there is one other solution and this may end up being the way forward once I get it tested, but using a combination of 'tail -f' command and 'netcat' I think I can pipe live, real-time call records being written to the Master.csv file out to a TCP port, this then opens up access to other professional CDR reporting software, which is likely to be the way my client goes. I have to find out if the info being streamed is actually usable by professional CDR software in its raw format but one company I spoke to thought it would be so long as I could get the TCP stream going on they can adjust the rest for a fee.
Hope this helps anyone coming by here looking for CDR reporting. I am surprised there isnt something better available that can cover the points I listed in the original post. I would love to see someone challenge that and prove me wrong.