I'd like to offer an alternative point of view on this one. We debated this for a while and decided to maintain notifications shared across request management for all items in the notifications table in order to take advantage of your first point, centralized management. Some of our users, however, feel (sometimes legitimately) that their items merit non-standard notifications. In my opinion, it's a pain to have these non-standard, one-off notifications intermingled with all of the other notifications on the shared RM tables in the shared notifications table. When I want a quick look into what we're sending out for all records in sc_req_item, I have to filter through x number of non-standard notifications in order to get an answer. It's nice to be able to quickly look and see what's standard, and then look to a particular workflow when I want to know what's going out for that item that isn't standard.
I think there's a degree of preference that comes into play with this, and the important thing is to adhere to a standard regardless of the route you pursue.
All of this said, Chuck makes fair points with both easy updates and internationalization. As to scripting, more complex options may prove challenging, but Chani's syntax does work for variables. I have not gotten the modern format for mail scripts to work.
