I think I know what you mean. I use <TMPL_LOOP> not only when I'm doing actual loops, but to speed up the coding when retrieving, say, a single user's information from a database. I don't think there's any better way, because this isn't really a bad way to do it in the first place.

I always use something like:

$tmpl->param( 
   filename => 'one_users_information.tmpl',
   user =>\@userinfo
);
[download]

HTH.