Front matter for articles and books

I've been attempting to customize the XSL FO stylesheets to give
articles the same front matter style as books, but that seems
to involve massive duplication of existing templates to change
"book" to "article"; I'm up to ~550 lines, and I'm not done yet.
My next task would seem to be deciphering the primary book
template and figuring out which portions I need to reproduce for
the main article template.

Is there any way to cut through this Gordian knot of hard-coded
dependencies on the type of container?

--
John R. Daily                                        
Director of Technology                            Progeny Linux Systems
                    Master of the ephemeral epiphany