> We may want to block sending emails until the templates have loaded

You may as well not start in that case because that would require queuing the mail and maybe running out of memory and losing all those messages. Bottom line, auth-server shouldn't be doing any of this. Eventually we need to move email packaging and delivery somewhere else.

>  if there're serious problems with the content server making the templates unavailable, we probably have worse things to worry about.

I don't want the availability of `/certificate/sign` to be affected in **any** way by content-server. That would be *much* worse for everyone.

> we'll have to add everything back in here that we've already deleted and we might as well not bother hitting the content server.

That's the rub. I think we *should* have all the languages locally. The one thing this boondoggle buys us is that we don't have to worry about updating the templates.