Hi Rob,
For me I don't think there is nothing wrong with your ways. I think what is needed is for someone to come up with a standard how to make use of those templates.
What to put and NOT to put on the page template, package template and site template. The hard part is convincing the package maintainers why this is beneficial (the new set of standard).
There is also the deeper issue of having the packages make use of some templating wherein no more cutomization will be done on the packages /www and only the design templates (look at the my post on Dave's thread). But this won't be resolved in the short term.
