The breakpoint for me has been the number of data consumers whom I am required to support with my perl code. Generally, I write a chunk of code to gather data which helps me do my job. Later, my PHB notices that I have this information and asks me to cook it to produce a report which he can use for politics (budget/staffing/what-have-you). Then his peers/bosses ask for further enhancements for their own political maneuverings and you end up being asked for calculations which make no sense from people you don't even know.

The break point for me has depended upon the uncontrolled data consumers. When I have a single data consumer, templates are overkill. When I have a handfull of relatively similar consumers, HTML::Template does the job just fine. If the community grows too large or too unwieldy, I prefer to dump the data into a platform neutral format (usually with XML::Writer) and make them pony up the resources for formatting (XSLT).

Then you crush them later with the raw data. ;-)