As I work more with snippets, cloning them with various variable changes, it seems to me that a great solution would be to allow snippets to use variable substitution. Not being a PHP programmer, the technical "guts" are beyond me, but - to call a standard city search snippet with two replaceable variables, it might look like this:

#city-search-template#&city='denver';&prop_type='residential';

The internal coding of the snippet would of course have to use the variable provided in the web page.

The goal would be to have simple, standardized snippets that could be re-used for different purposes without cloning.