I understand
the need for cite, thats why it is still there :) But...
(...)
What about converting these to ref tags?
Unfortunately most of those
are designed to format the ref's to a
"proper" standard that we use (Harvard/MLA standard iirc) and are
designed to easily updated when we change out standards (eg: recently
the "pages" value changed in one of the cite templates and a bot when
though and fixed them all)