I'll agree that the folks posting in this topic haven't directly commented on the original question. Some good points have been raised but they're not really related to what WinSrev's looking for, feel free to discuss those ideas (code consistency, caching, templating appropaches) in other topics but not here.

If anyone does have any comments on parsing the {if} blocks the they're very much welcome.

P.S. WinSrev, please don't get upset if people can't stick to the topic at hand or take wider viewpoints than asked for. That's no reason to label the members of an entire forum as "incredibly stupid", however frustrating it is to have a question repeatedly ignored.