I'm in the same shoes as you. I have tentatively settled on Catalyst, but I am not sure it is the right decision. The setup has costed me a lot of sweat, mostly due to my own ignorance -- specially when I consider how easy it was was to start coding in php, compared with Catalyst, I have had my moments of doubt.

However, I have also had php projects bog down with unclear separation of concerns, difficulty adding new features, and the other usual suspects. With catalyst, there are so many cool features that I expect the time I save down the line will more than make up for the time I have lost so far. Kind of like learning regexes, versus vanilla find-and-replace. :)

You also may find Survey of Surveys on HTML Templating systems helpful in making a decision. Good luck!

update: fixed missing id:// in above link. now works.