Microsoft's view of the Mac world is upside down. A huge proportion of corporate presentations are created by designers using Macs. But the Mac version of PowerPoint is a lame, tame, minimal version of what's available in Windows.
Microsoft would better serve their corporate user base if they created an industrial-strength version of PowerPoint for MacOS that could not only do all the operations of the Windows version, but surpass it. Custom table styles! 9 levels of text in text boxes! SuperTheme creation! Custom Effects Themes (Shape Styles)! Custom SmartArt! All of these are possible with the current file format, MS just has to build a program interface.
Rather than viewing the Mac platform as second-best based on market share, understand that is the platform of choice for designers who create corporate templates that make Windows more accessible and beautiful.
Of course, this would be a more expensive program, more comparable to InDesign than Outlook. But it could do so much to eliminate the common misperception of PowerPoint as a lame refuge of the elderly and infirm.

The PC version of Powerpoint allows you to control "Image Size and Quality" for the presentation. The three options available are Discard editing data, Do not compress images in file, and a setting for Default resolution. Please add these options to the Mac version of Powerpoint.

Our use case is that we create very visual heavy presentations. These presentations quickly become unwieldy in a collaborate setting, reaching 300MB, 400MB, or 500MB in size. This is due to raw images being uploaded. Having the option to set a default resolution so files are compressed to a standard quality on the way in would help us keep file sizes to a more manageable size for collaboration.

It would be helpful to have the same features in PowerPoint for Mac as for Windows. It should not be any different in the first place!
For the first time in my design career I have to create a template in PowerPoint! So my adventure the last couple of days is trying to understand the software and it's not user-friendly at all. Most of the tuts are for Windows and you know what... we Mac users miss out a few of good and helpful features... like grids and settings for grids. I found something like 'snap to grid' - but what grid are we talking about? And is there really not an option for a custom font set?

The ability to set a default table style in a presentation is a major omission from PowerPoint. Currently when you insert a table it takes the formatting of one of the built-in table styles, which you can then change by choosing another one of the built-in styles.

Most brands require a specific format for their tables - e.g. a certain colour of header row, a certain style of borders, etc. It would be very helpful if these attributes could be baked into a template so that new tables automatically take on the correct styling.

Currently the only workaround for this is to include a sample table on a slide within the template, and ask users to copy that table and adapt for their data, or to manually make their table styling look the same – both of which of course are universally ignored because they require more work.

It is possible to set the default style of text boxes, shapes and lines, so default table styles is a completely logical addition.