User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-1295676-20150821232411/@comment-24473195-20150821235956

"But it was such a song and dance getting to that point."

That's to be expected. It is a relatively new tool, neither wikia nor wikians have really gotten used to it.

"Previewing a portable infobox is a nightmare, because I'm making changes to two pages to edit one template."

Yes, the feature is incomplete at this point in time, according to wikia staff, visual editing is eventually coming. For now this tool somewhat facilitates infobox design. Note that it is just an experiment, not the eventual Gui feature itself.

"The real kicker though, is after I'd added all these nice colors to my portable infobox, I previewed it on mobile and it was in gray."

I can't speak for wikia staff, but that mobile infobox is far easier to adapt and change rather than the franken-boxes. Eventually, there's a good chance that there may be custom tools to change the mobile look. If new features are added to infoboxes, it will easily be possible to migrate them to all infoboxes in 300000+ wikias with relative ease (assuming they are adopted). They can also automatically collapse, and allow the user to focus on the main document rather than scrolling so much to see the page content.

Theoretically, given enough data they can even automatically recommend the creation of infoboxes by cross-checking information from many infoboxes from all wikias, for example.

@Wikia staff, I recommend making a training video for these new portable infoboxes ASAP.