(I apologise for breaking the thread)
The reason that I went the route of creating an extension vs a skin was that I wanted the most flexibility in adapting the content for mobile device rendering. There are a number of sections that need to be removed from the final output in order to render the content effectively on mobile devices. So, being able to use a PHP output buffer handling is a nice feature. I also wanted the ability to use many of the features that are available when writing an extension to hook into core functionality.
-- Patrick
Sorry, but this is a poor excuse.