Aha TT3 sounds interesting. But as long we have the other 999 CPAN templating engines we will have different preferences.
May be one could minimize everything to a very very small core. May be that would be usefull and people could improve it?
I do not see why your arguments weren't the same for DBI/DBD which was a hit. When DBI/DBD did an API unification job, then "TPI" has also good chances? Or would we need something like SQL for template engines?