Overall, using the corresponding Canvas/OSG level helpers for this should be more Canvas friendly.
Let me try to get everyone on the same page...
The status is that I have little idea of canvas internals. The current setup and workflow is designed by Richard, and he's developed and tested it for the F-15. I am fairly sure he also has done some optimization on it.
I don't think we've every had the situation in FG that we had to support 11 screens in a cockpit, each of which can show potentially close to a hundred different pages, each page potentially displaying a hundred properties. So whatever we do, we're testing out limits.
I have some 15 display pages done so far, so there's 80% or so still left to be done. It takes me about 2-4 days to do one, so the current avionics represents a signifciant amount of work - two months of my FG time probably. I have an established workflow which lets me work at this speed. Given that, there's very few conditions under which I'd throw that work away and start from scratch with a different approach.
What's certainly not going to happen is that I start toying with canvas, make use of code snippets, create test cases to see whether there's actually a performance gain. What conceivably might happen is that I change the workflow if the current design turns out to be unscalable and there's a clearly established workflow which brings demonstrably superior performance - but I don't see any of this so far.
I appreciate that you're trying to help out with your experience, but... it actually needs to be helpful to have an effect. I have a ton of avionics modeling still to do, I don't really have the time to go and experiment, I'm going to follow the procedure which is tested (and which you approved of to the degree that you suggested to Richard to make it generally available). Getting the design right to match the real system is a fairly complicated problem, because the real Shuttle avionics isn't in any way simple or intuitive - it's a mess, and I had to read through the manual three times to understand how it ties together. I don't get the impression from several of your suggestion that you understand quite what we're trying to simulate (or I plainly don't understand some of your suggestion) - so maybe it'd help if you read 2.6 of the crew manual so that we all know we're talking about the same thing?
I hope that helps avoiding potential frustration in the future