I don't edit as much as I did in years past, and my memory is obviously feeble, as I find that I'm often making mistakes with subst'ing.
Worse, the explosion of parser functions has made the templates incredibly complex. Subst'ing is increasingly less "user friendly".
It's hard to document ("subst" doesn't seem to translate well or mean anything to many folks), harder to remember, and hardest to type:
{{subst:TEMPLATE|P1|P2|subst=subst:}}
I'm often forgetting that final parameter, and conscientiously have to edit again. Others don't bother subst'ing at all!
Is there a solution proposed anywhere already?
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If not, here's my rough idea:
Leading {{:: -- easy to type (already holding the shift key) -- same as {{subst: -- only happens in edit parsing, no change to database.
Leading {{## -- easy to type (already holding the shift key) -- obviously must be different than {{:: -- used inside templates, tells the edit parsing to "subst:" only subst'ing, otherwise ignored and treated as concatenation. Same as C pre-processing operator.
Are these already in use?
Would be a heck of a lot easier to document....