In IL-2 the templates are widely shared, usually in the same folder as the skin you download. In AH, Skin templates are highly protected by their owners (it does take quite the time & effort to make one. Just a difference in the two communities I guess. I'm not a skinner, so I have no templates to hand out, but when it comes to anything else I do (sounds, terrains, etc.) I'm always more thann happy to share with anyone who asks. Keeps the community tighter that way in my eyes. 
To be honest, as somebody who is part of both IL-2 and AH2 community, I find AH2 community much more open.
Now about the templates. From a skin to skin my "performance" in skinning improves. And I figured that you do not really need templates (I created the 3 skins above without any templates). The first "problem" in re-skinning was to get all the fine structures like service doors, lines of rivets etc correctly. However, given the B/W bump mapping texture it is
very easy - you already have B/W pattern of rivets, doors and other fine structures. You only need to copy them. This way I skinned P-51D and C205, and it was quite fast job to do. I spend more time on fine grained painting details as how to get all the insignia correctly, put correct tail numbers, get correct colors, and squadron symbols and of course get the appropriate and accurate sources.
Collecting and verifying sources sometimes takes much longer time. In many cases there are no original photos of the aircraft only some paining schema from doubtful sources - so you just go and recheck against 2-3 other sources before you can assume that they are correct.
For example IAF B-17 would be quite hard to get correctly. There is a one B/W photo of tail marking. The rest are drawings of the same aircraft with the same tail number but with contradicting colors.
