I'm thoroughly familiar with KDP's policies, requirements, tools and limitations.
But let's unpack some of this, in more or less reverse order.
First, what a client wants is not always a good idea, best practice, workable or sometimes even possible. If a client wants the moon painted pink and on a string, because somewhere they got the idea that's an option (or, worse, read a blog or article presenting it as NEW! or some seekret trik for business success), our first job is to bring them down to reality so that the project can be successfully completed. If they won't listen, politely decline their business. (While we're not doctors, just as a doctor won't do any damn fool thing a patient demands, I think we have something of an ethical/professional responsibility not to take on a user-guided project that will sink a lot of money in a second-rate outcome, or a flat failure.)
Second, I believe strongly in "respect the medium" — and for the vast sea of amateur, novice and inexperienced providers in digital publication, that might as well be posted in Uighur (ۋاستىگە ھۆرمەت قىلىÚ, by the way). Print is not digital; e-book is not print-book; EPUB is not PDF. To try and force print/PDF page rigidity into EPUB is disrespecting the latter medium and shows a lack of grasp of everything but some technical fundamentals (and a host of crappy, outdated tools). That EPUB has a fixed-layout option is not an excuse or an alternative; it's a cranky, difficult, unreliable and largely pointless format.
FXL EPUB has 1.001 legitimate uses, driven by market realities. the "1" is for picture-page books, those with little or no live text, like children's books and graphic novels. Once a book is composed primarily of text, and individual elements like illustrations, text pulls, tables and the like, it's no longer suitable for FXL. That is, if a page has anything but a full-page graphic and perhaps a text block or two, it's no longer a case for FXL. (The 0.001? I suppose someone, somewhere has a project that goes outside that restriction and is best served by an FXL publication. I've never seen one, though.) FXL is beloved of amateurs and novices because it seems like the simple, obvious, easy, "proper" way to do one of those e-book things. (It's not.)
Reflowable EPUB is the proper choice for e-books because it wholly respects the medium and brings the maximum all-around value to all potential (human) readers, on all reader devices and apps and pretty much all those that might come along in the future. If it's "loose content" (not that one-picture-per page), it should be done in reflowable format.
What's that you say? It's not a novel or other flowing text end to end? Irrelevant. While novels and narratives and to some extent things like poetry are easy to dump into reflowable format — and, frankly, far too many "experts" have done nothing else, whether it's one time, ten or a thousand — that is not the scope or limit of the format.
Yes, converting complex content to reflowable is an advanced skill. Creating elements that will stay and work together across liquid pages takes an added layer of techniques and vision. It's not something that can be done for some Fiverr or UpWork competitive flat fee, in most cases. And now we've circled back to the client, who is likely completely clueless about all of the above and chooses a book designer/creator on largely faulty understanding of what the real processes, costs and useful goals are.
We won't talk about KIndle here as the next step, except to say that on the technical end, the get-to-published path, the "support" of author/publishers and the tools and processes they offer... they have a long, long way to go to be considered suitable for professional work. Success on KDP far more often lies in successfully bypassing their amateur processes than in making use of them. I'll say even less about their user support community.
As for "opinion," yes indeed, this is all "my opinion" — as a publisher and publication designer whose experience and productions stretch from pasting things up on blueline board to converting some of the most complex books possible to successful Kindle editions to writing and maintaining what I believe is the only complete, comprehensive and technically focused book (and website) on successful EPUB/Kindle conversion. But I'll stand on that opinion.
Again, sincerely, full props for speaking up to offer help. But it's not really useful to skip a whole thread's contents, whether fresh or moribund, to toss in a suggestion that's already been discussed, unless you have something useful to add to the discussion.
┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋
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