Make the whole of template space editable by admins only, and loosen the grip on adminship. Templates are probably an area which should be kept to trusted users, and admins are our trusted users. Might make the community face up to rewiring RFA.
Or resurrect the middle option, like the idea of giving trusted users the rollback function. Even trusted users wouldn't get the admin bit if it were loosened, but would be perfectly trusted to have access to something like that.
A middle option sounds good. I'm not sure how it should be handed out - an automatic system would be good, but would probably be easy to get around. A manual system would be a lot of work... (there are lots of trustworthy wikipedians).