While a good number of folks have asked about skuidifying the salesforce email templates - we are not aware of anyone who has done so.  If someone showed the way they would be a hero for sure… 

A thought on this…

Would it be possible to use javascript to populate each of the related list items into a ‘long text’ field on the parent model?

e.g. A snippet which iterates over the related list, and for each record, populates a new line in the long text field on the parent model. It would need a line break at the end of each record to be put into the long text field.

It would probably need to limit the number of related records, but in my case I’ll only ever have 5 or 6 related records at most.

I don’t necessarily want to maintain the structure of a table in this long text field, so just simple text is fine, but it would be nice to get each item on a new line. This could probably be done with a trigger in the background, but I thought it might be simpler with some javascript.

(The effect of this is that the email template could be generated on a single object, which gives a bit more flexibility as to which salesforce email templates can be used, and subsequently edited by the user before sending).