Modes - Necessary Construct or Syntactic Sugar

Suppose there was a genuine use case for modes. By genuine I mean the
transform requires me to process the same nodes more than once and in
different ways.

Can I do this without using modes.

The first thing that comes to mind is creating an separate stylesheet
for the "2nd mode" and applying it's template rules via apply-imports.

The next thing that comes to mind is what if some of those rules want
to apply templates from the parent stylesheet. Well importing the
importer into the importee is not allowed but the rules don't seem to
prohibit including the importee.

So is this sufficient to dispense with modes from the subset of the
language I want to use.