Thanks Random. I agree that that is a better approach, because it lets us de-couple the link text from the link. But in this case I think the redirects are legitimate, and it is good to point into the list via them as they insulate the template against any change in target. i.e. if someone creates an article on an R-phrase, the redirect can be re-targetted. If we were linking directly into the list, we'd be stuffed.
Bryan, if you prefer the tooltip to say "Explosive when dry" rather than "R1: Explosive when dry", you could change  from
 [[{{{2}}}: {{{1}}}|{{{2}}}]]
to
 [[{{{2}}}: {{{1}}}|{{{2}}}]]
Hesperian