I am building out a suite of templates to use on various websites.  We are a very large educational institution with 15 subdomains and 100+ offices which share the same components, but will all need their own branding--I have a header component that has some simple configuration (office name, dropdown navigation) options that need to be inherited down to child pages from each site's homepage. (I face similar challenges with sidebar content and footers).

I'm beginning to realize that these templates and layout containers don't support inheritance behavior like the old iparsys did, given the structure of the new pages and the lack of consistent names (at least not out of the box). Maybe I'm missing something quite big, but the only way I can see being able to support such a wide range of sites using the editable templates would be to build out a suite of templates for each office.

I'd really like to use the editable templates, but can't support ~150 different sets of templates (homepage, secondary, landing, content, etc...).

Ideally,  I would build out one set of templates. Then uses would configure their headers and footers on their toplevel pages and those settings would be inherited down. The only alternative I've thought of is to have inheritance behavior built into the components themselves, but that's untenable, as I'd need to add this functionality to every component individually, I think this is an unsustainable blending of purposes of a component (why should a text component manage inheritance?).

Is there a better way to do this that doesn't mean creating 150 templates suites or adding inheritance behavior directly to the templates?

I'm in AEM 6.2 right now, but will be upgrading in the next several months.