And yes, I went with Template Toolkit, because I hate HTML::Template, because I hate angle bracket languages in general for human editing.

It must have really bothered you to write your post then, right? HTML is an angle-bracket language for human editing! It's not my favorite either but it seems silly to critique an HTML templating system for using angle brackets.

Of course, it's easy to use to the filter option to HTML::Template->new() to allow [tmpl_var foo] if that's what you want!

-sam