I realized after seeing a HyperEdit screenshot that having a floating snippets palette would be immensely useful in TextMate.
I've mocked up how I might think you could implement this, focusing the selected snippets on the current editing mode... In any case, I don't think that snippets belong in a hierarchical menu, and as much as I would like for you to be able to stick to minimal modal interfaces, I think that in this case, it's worth adding one more.
Chris