You're missing the point. HTML::Template doesn't aspire to be anything like Template Toolkit. Deliberately. They fill completely different roles. Mason fills a third role.

• HTML::Template is designed to do one thing - be fast. Be very, very fast. It has extremely few things it can do, but it does those things very well. It's a mark of how well samtregar designed it that it's used in as many places and in as many ways as it is.
• Template Toolkit is designed to do one thing - be very easy to work with. And, it does this very well. It renders very fast, but that's not its primary goal. It's primary goal is ease of abstraction. And, it does this very well.
• Mason isn't designed to be a templating system. It's a Content Management System, similar to Asgard and many others. It's a mark of its strong design that it can be used solely as a templating system. And, like the others, it does CMS very well.

You can't even abstract out common functionality. I'm in the process of looking to convert my apps from H::T to TT because I need the additional functionality. (Most apps will never need this functionality.) I'm finding that the very code I'll be using to generate the data structures for TT is going to be different than the code used for H::T. In many cases, up to 80% different.

This isn't an indictment of H::T. In fact, when I first started work on these apps, I knew I would convert to TT at some point. I used H::T for its strenth - speed of initial development. I know it inside and out. I could throw it out there and not worry about it.

TT, on the other hand, requires a lot of thought and up-front design. I didn't know enough about what I would want, nor could I gather that information in the initial 6 weeks I was given to make everything work. Now, I do know enough, so I can do my design and convert my apps.

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