G'day G1ggy,
Don't template anyone? Dear god, what are we coming too. Then again, I'm a bit biased on this, see [[WP:TTR]]
<reads [[WP:TTR]] />
Good grief, man, did that hurt? It certainly looks like something you should only admit to having written after accepting what I believe is referred to in the patois of the streets as "a severe beat-down".
Boilerplate warning templates are a necessary evil. They are necessary for two reasons:
1) Not everyone wants to expend the energy required to constantly rewrite the same message to new users they don't yet care about.
2) Many --- *many* --- CVUers, RC patrollers, etc. are utterly lacking in the social graces. Indeed, some even have trouble forming coherent sentences without reference to 'net zp34k or the word "fuck", and thus boilerplate templates could be seen as infinitely better than the alternative. This is one reason why the rise of the Anti-Vandal Admin should be viewed with alarm.
I try to explain what I mean in plain English[0] whenever possible. Generally, I get better results than with templates (occasionally, my results are no better than they would have been; they are never worse, because I do not belong in category '2' above). I often find that there is no template that properly expresses what I need to say; the CVU approach is to use the templates anyway[2], mine is to sit down and damn well *say* it.
There are times when I will use the templates. This is when the template is good enough, and I don't really care enough about the user in question to bother using my own words; or when the template really does say best exactly what I intend (rare, but has occurred).
In what way is this approach illegitimate, or even inferior to "template 'em until they glow"?
[0] For a certain value of "plain". I am, after all, Aussie[1].
[1] Well, I pretend to be. Really I'm an old granny in a council flat in Essex ...
[2] And to say that saying something in one's own words is somehow illegitimate. There was a case last year --- April? --- of an RfA candidate being opposed because he didn't always use {{test-n}} templates to warn people, but sometimes spoke to them on a human-to-human level. I can only imagine that things have gotten stupider since, in accordance with the Second Coming Law of Thermodynamics.