<This reply is still my own personal views, and in no way represents anything official>
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com
wrote:
If we have to resort to such magic to make templates do what we want, templates are quite simply broken; how can we explain that to a newcomer. "To help with these templates, all you have to know about are wikitext templates, our own implementation of lisp, Javascript, and Lua, and you'll be good to go". I suspect the number of people in the world who know how to do that is very close to 1. Especially for usecases like this, we need something less complicated.
If "we" (TINW) actually want dialogs (which I'm not convinced of beyond a few very special cases), trying to do it in templates with embedded code is the wrong way to do it.