This sounds like a good solution, except I'm creating16 units with about 100 slides each (SME-driven decision), so that's 1600 copies. Then to further complicate matters, I'm importing about 100 PowerPoint slides per unit (1600 slides) which I then have to cut/paste into the blank slides with working layers/triggers (including everything necessary to support closed captioning per Steve Flowers's example). So we're talking 3200 cut/copy/paste operations before I can really start working on my content.
So, yes, I really need this as part of my template master.