The *article* syntax should be very simple. It's already way too complicated for the type of person who is supposed to be contributing, with pipe tables, HTML, visual style markup, and so on. Currently, only those who aren't intimidated by code can contribute to the encyclopedia, leading to significant systemic bias. Using templates, especially templates with complex markup and conditionals, makes *article markup* simpler and easier to edit. There are still plenty of people who understand them and can make changes when necessary. How exactly were they designed to be played with? If they were really only designed for one specific purpose, is there a good reason for not expanding their breadth? If they can be used as an intermediate step between editors and developers, and make the wiki markup simpler and easier to use for regular people, shouldn't it be done? The developers don't have time to do everything we want, but if other editors can do it with templates, and it's not hurting the servers, and it's not hurting anything else, where's the problem? Obviously it would be better if this functionality was present in the Mediawiki itself, but until it is, what makes these templates so bad? They make the encyclopedia better.