the v word but not a religious salvo

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

I wondered if anyone here is at all familiar with the different
insertions related plugins for vim?

This is not a plug for vim... Although I am embarrassingly dumb about
elisp, I am a veteran emacs user for over 10 yrs and not looking to
switch this late in the game, but like lots of people I've used vim
most of that time too.  Mostly for lighter work like quick edits to
system files.  Or to do the same remotely so I can rely only on what
the remote might have onboard.

One vim plugin I've seen in use called xpt looks and sounds very very
useful.

There is a (thankfully short) online demo, you may find it somewhat
poorly done... I did.  However it does give a good hint as to the
power of this type of approach to helping programmers along with
inserting oft repeated things and even whole script outlines.

  (vim xpt templates plugin)
  http://vimeo.com/4449258

I'm not plugging for vim... what I want to ask is if there is any kind
of thing like this available for emacs.

I know about skeletons and have written dozens of them for use in
various places.

And maybe a skeleton can do the advanced things demo'ed in the above
cited demo... if so maybe someone has a few examples I can mess with.

I'm thinking something that not only inserts a chunk but offers more
help at specific points if you signal that you want that.  

I guess it would be an `interactive' skeleton...  I have no idea how
to write such a thing but I might be able to distort, slaughter and
generally torture some else's coding in such a way as to get what I
want from it.

Otherwise I'd like to know about any packages that do something even
vaguely similar to vim's xpt.