It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Something has to be doing the game logic… might as well make that part as simple as possible.
Yes, you could have some spell entity template thing that when invoked simply iterated over the AOEs it knows how to create and creates them. So you’d have RangeTemplate or some other non-real-component so that it wouldn’t show up in your regular AOE sets.
Or you can just implement the ‘create the entities’ logic directly and not try to make all of that automatic. It’s more trouble than it’s worth I think.
…then again, my 'create the Foo Spell" would have been a groovy script so it’s easily changeable anyway.