The MediaWiki templating syntax is commonly a subject of ire and disdain. Many templates are very hard to read and maintain, a veritable forest of braces. The visual effect is often less than pleasing and proper formatting of template calls is often impossible. On top of that, many complex templates are inefficient and extremely slow. It is therefore easy to come to the conclusion that the current templating syntax is fundamentally broken and should be replaced with something better.

I will attempt to demonstrated how this conclusion is mistaken. In fact, the current syntax is near-optimal for the problem at hand, and its current horridness is largely self-inflicted and mostly easily fixed.