Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services:
A MSDN blog post showed up a couple of days ago, listing the new features of 1.1 final and 1.2 preview.
You can see it here.
From the looks of things, it might actually be a viable solution again, where the support for more than one feature and less "behind the scenes" work is done for you. For the most part I had given up on using the templates, because I lost a lot of the flexibility I wanted, only when I just needed a simple webpart. With the WSP view, you can again rename the features and files to make things look more appropriate, this has been extended to adding new features here.
It is a well laid out post, and should be a good read for SharePoint developers of all skill levels.
-DK