In the end I think it's simply a matter of opinion. You could have two people look at two approaches to a problem: one might find one solution confusing but the other solution intuitive; the other person might find the other person's opinion backwards. This leads us to the old saying, "Opinions are like buttholes: everyone's got one, and everyone thinks that everyone else's stinks".

Personally, I lean toward the templating approach - not because I think it is better than the other techniques, but just because it fits well within my manner of thinking. A friend of mine uses the same templating system (we've been working on it together for some time) but he also uses some home-brew CGI-like directives within his templates to generate the HTML (Warning: only a complete lunatic (or a genius) would dare combine the two). The advantage? He decided last week to convert all his pages to XHTML - all he had to do was modify his directive set. Done.