User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Guide to Infoboxes/@comment-166269-20130116005658/@comment-166269-20130121013755

I've arrived at my "HTML tables" conclusion after working on dozens of templates of all size scales, from small, self-contained infoboxes all the way up to this monstrosity. You're not going to convince me that mixing wikimarkup tables and ParserFunctions is better in the long run, for any type of template. ;)

I also understand where you're coming from with metatemplates, and I certainly agree that it's quite easy to get carried away and make some monstrous system that you yourself are afraid to touch for fear of Breaking Everything Horribly, much less expecting anyone else to be able to edit it - I'm certainly guilty of doing that myself, and I've seen more examples than I'd care to admit on Wikipedia and elsewhere. However, metatemplates when designed and used appropriately are endlessly useful: I will never, ever, not-even-if-you-paid-me write a navbox, infobox, or article message box from scratch (unless it's for a purpose so specialized that the metatemplates being used simply won't work, and I've had cases of that too); the metatemplates at my disposal simply work too well and remove a huge chunk of concern. You also have to consider the purpose of the template, though: if it makes heavy use of advanced markup such as SMW or lots of string manipulation, you should be looking for opportunities to abstract away as much of that detail as possible, so you don't have to think about as much when you're working on the template. And particularly for SMW, there's a huge amount of magic designed into the markup and functionality of the extension anyways, so making liberal use of metatemplates can actually simplify matters a great deal.