Charlotte Webb wrote:
I don't have an opinion on what makes what look more professional. The specifics of that can be hammered out at a later date. The first step is to establish a self-maintaining consistency of appearance.
I've completed my hijacking of [[Template:Infobox]] without any complaints being raised and have actually started using it in a few reasonably out-of-the-way places (I want to test it in the field without stumbling into any landmines in the process :). So hopefully step one is on the way.
The second step is to (somehow) ensure that it's not overridden unless there is a damn good reason to do so.
I've included the ability to override all the various styles in [[Template:Infobox]] in the same manner as [[Template:Navbox]]. But I wouldn't worry too much about that. I've done a lot of navbox work and I've found that in practice the colors are often changed, a relatively harmless modification in most cases, but the other styling characteristics are much more rarely overridden. And being able to restyle the template helps overcome resistance from editors who are guarding an old-style navbox against intruders, by allowing the guts to be changed with minimal disturbance to the outward appearance.
If we didn't allow the CSS to be tweaked using parameters people would do it anyway by inserting divs and spans instead, making it much more awkward to fiddle with in the future. In some far distant time if we decide "all navboxes will have uniform color schemes without exception", we'd be able to override every last one of the overrides simply by editing the root navbox template.