Moving on
ChrisGualtieri points out that it was I who created . And guess what? Within a few months the following was added to MOS:DASH:
Also, it is recommended to use templates that provide formatting improvements over plain versions of dashes, such as ... , which inserts an em dash while allowing a line break after it.
The lesson? That at least one of the formatting innovations you tsk-tsk here is now a standard option for Wikipedia at large. Who knows? Maybe some of the others will end up in MOS too, if they're not strangled in the cradle in the name of anodyne uniformity.
There being no opinion expressed on the question (in the Discussion section, above) I'm gone ahead and deleted the two types of comments mentioned there (unused quote material, START/END markers) since I gather editors find them to have low signal-to-noise ratio.
However, I've restored many of the deleted notes, which were typically things like:




These are exactly the sort of the material that belongs in hidden notes.
I've added cites to the material tagged cite-needed.
Per the guideline BGwhite pointed to, I've deleted templates from cite templates