In reply to Dee Burgett.

Thank you, Dee! You nailed that. Sure, the main benefit is in using and reusing the data templates - create once, use multiple times. And with dozens of variables to create (read in) we don't have to include and re-run their descriptions.
I was too a bit skeptical of writing some obvious things about creating templates, but I felt compelled to do it for the sake of usage as I myself “sinned” for too long copy/pasting those length/label/format statements from one program to another.