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 | This page in a nutshell: Not using citation templates is fine. Don't mess with a problem that doesn't need fixing. |
Templates are evil. Well, not all templates are evil, but many are, and in particular, citation templates. Why? Because they introduce unnecessary clutter in the edit window. Wikimarkup was originally very clean and simple. It was easy to understand and hardly interfered at all with the readability of the text. Citation templates, in contrast, introduce a lengthy list of parameters, many of which are hard to understand how to use without some research, and only fulfil simple functions that can easily be achieved with plain text.