Requests for comment/Nasty templates

Problem
Template:Cite and its relatives are causing excessively long parsing times for pages that call these templates hundreds of times. For a large article, nearly the entire time parsing is spent on the citations, e.g., "Rod Blagojevich corruption charges" was benchmarked at 20 s, 17 s of which were spent on the citations.

Implementation
The primary objective is to remove the logic of these nasty templates like Template:Cite from wikicode / ParserFunctions into PHP logic, as a means of (presumably) greatly decreasing the time spent on producing the formatted references output.

Extension:TemplateAdventures has been proposed as a possible solution to this problem.