Footnotes - Worse Than Racism?

I have come to hate footnotes. They break up the flow of a paper, especially when the footnote carries on to the next page before the text does. That drives me crazy. I would love to skip them, but sometimes they include crucial information. Ideally we could just eliminate footnotes entirely. Barring that, here are some possibilities:

1. Only use footnotes for citations. This means that most readers can ignore them entirely - it is easy enough to refer back to a footnote if you end up needing the cited material.

2. If you must include substantive points in a footnote, put the footnote number in bold. This way we can ignore the ones that merely include citations.

3. Really limit footnotes to information that is superfluous to the average reader. So for instance, it would be fine to explain a term or give an example, but the reader would only read the footnote if she needed some explanation for ideas in the text. I think this is how footnotes are supposed to work, but the law review articles I've been reading often include copious substantive footnotes. It's not rare for a law review article to include hundreds of footnotes.

So yeah, I think footnote abuse is rampant, and these guys will definitely be first against the wall when the Revolution comes.