e1front, you could easily configure skinswap to have a fall back skin directory if a specific file isn't found in the current, this way you could just use X number of .tpl's for each new skin and leave a base skin for the rest of the .tpl's.
X-Cart doesn't use any caching features of Smarty by default so your not gonna notice too big of a speed difference as far as compiling is concerned.
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