Template talk:Things

Usage & styling
Trying to understand a few, uhh, things about this template:
 * 1) The description states that sprite names are used, yet the template deviates from the Doom2 IWAD in two entries: Shotgun guy is   rather than SPOS, is Heavy weapon dude is   rather than CPOS. The original author of the template seems inactive since 2010, so I suppose the reason for that cannot be unearthed anymore. Since the template in its intended parametric form is used only once and without those two enemies, I figured it's okay to fix them.
 * 2) This one example table shows a problem: all rows containing just zeroes are still displayed, while wiki convention is to prune such rows completely. An attempt seems to have been made to output rows conditionally on them have a defined parameter, but that was reverted at the next edit. Does anyone, or Sigma 7 in particular (who made that edit and is still active), know why this avenue was not pursued further?
 * 3) So currently this template is always used after subst-ing, but is the (long-term) goal to make its parametric usage fully functional, and the preferred approach? Or is there no consensus about that (yet)?
 * 4) Some creative contributors combine multiple columns with the same value into single columns using colspan attributes, e.g. here. It seems nigh-on impossible to cope with that in template logic, but I'm not well-versed in that. Is this table style to be preferred over repeating identical columns?  If so, then the whole parametric approach might as well be stripped from the template altogether, yesno?

Background: In light of this discussion I'm researching how best to generate the Things table via my DMMPST tool, and my current line of thinking is that parametric usage may work better for me. But if #4 is answered affirmatively (or #2 cannot be addressed in template logic), then I'd have to work with a subst-ed template.