The Template::Toolkit you mention is quite similar to Smarty, give it another try if you like the mini-language approach. I've only been using TT for a short time, but I'm satisfied with it so far.

There's a nice article about choosing a templating machine at the mod_perl site: http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/tmpl/comparison/comparison.html and I'm sure you'll find some interesting debates here on PM.