It sure would be handy to eliminate the physical files for email templates and get them in the database. It's especially awkward when copying/moving a client storefront.

/App_Data/ itself contains all the machine-specific files. License file, encryption file, all the minor config files. But it also contains the /EmailTemplates/ folder which is actually THEME/STORE specific, not machine specific.

So we can't just copy a site and ignore /AppData/ We have to ignore the contents of /AppData/ but still remember to grab the /App_Data/EmailTemplates/ sub folder.

Moving theme/store specific files out of /App_Data/ or just start storing the HTML in the database would make things alot easier for us developers. It cut down potential for error when deploying projects to live, or delivering completed sites in a usable fashion to the client.