Hi, you rather seem to have formed your opinion already. But what you showed is a Template Toolkit template. It's nothing to do with writing application code in Perl for use with Dancer or any other PSGI application or any other solution.

With Dancer2, as with most web app frameworks, you *may* use a templating engine to generate the HTML your clients see. You *may* use Template if you go that route. You also might return JSON and have a client-side framework such as AngularJS generate all of the HTML. Or you might use any of a million other solutions. It's completely up to you what you output and how you send it.

As for what Dancer2 "buys you," it buys you the ability to begin making web apps instead of trying to make a framework to make webapps.