User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-1251315-20150820114515/@comment-4522253-20150820134330

The "boring" look can be changed with CSS. If you are using something else to make your otherwise not-boring Infoboxes look different, that's a bad practice, to say the least.

I used to think as you do, but I'm an experienced template designer and coder who is changing his opinion. ParserFunctions are expensive site-wise and unwieldly to use for most, and if you're employing more than a few in a given Template, you probably should be using Lua anyway. (Not just opinion, there are metrics to support how much easier Lua is on the system; frankly it's not difficult to learn.)

The big downside (might be an upside for you) is that Portable Infoboxes are not easily compatible with Lua, so they can't be migrated.