Something I'd find really handy would be to be able to embed variables/functions/whatever in the content as entered via the TinyMCE editor - i.e., treat this user-edited content as if it were an SS template. So, for example, the maintainer of the site could write whatever they like on the page but if they wanted a table of students in their page, they could simply type in $StudentTable and this would be correctly parsed as templates are.

Is this completely far-fetched?

2.4 will have tokenized content support for doing just this :D. I don't think it made it into the alpha but I think it should be in the 2.4 branch (if you use svn). Currently one of the easiest ways is just doing http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=recipes:customising-content-in-your-templates, but thats not very nice. The token system will be more useful.

Great to hear this will be there for 2.4. In the meantime, though, the existing technique looks as if it will work fine for me - thanks for pointing it out!