The thing about overkill is, you can never have too much of it. Personally, I have had good success using Template Toolkit. The ttree utility sounds like a fit for your problem to me - it basically takes a directory tree of template files, fills in the values and creates a filled-in directory tree of files.

Of course, there remains the problem that all template systems suck, but at least Template Toolkit is not specifically geared towards HTML, which is a plus in this situation. Of course, the lure of ttree will be that it is too inflexible to handle all situations and hence you will be tempted to put program logic into your templates. Template Toolkit is a horrible language to program in, if you're trying to create expressions more complex than a simple addition (and even that...).

I like Text::Template myself. It is dead easy to use, and as long as the maintainer of the templates knows Perl (or knows not to touch the code between the delimiters) it is OK.

If the logic in the template is a bit convoluted I use several templates: if you need to generate complex formatting within a loop, create several templates, one for the entire output and one (or more) for the inside bits.

I'm using Text::ScriptTemplate for my project. It is very simple, the main disadvantage being that if you have (syntax-) errors in the embedded Perl code, they are sometimes hard to find because you don't get any information about the line numbers. So I wouldn't recommend it for templates where you have to embed a lot of code logic, but otherwise it's not bad.

FYI, I switched from HTML::Template to Template toolkit. It's overkill, absolutely. And there are things that make it take far too much effort for use at $work. But, when I went to write the CB stats, I already knew how to approach it, and it was really, really easy.

Mind you, I'm of the opinion that it's better to learn one good multipurpose tool and learn it well, than to learn a bazillion tools, and not really know any of them. I still look at other tools, but I only delve deep into them if they appear to solve a set of problems I don't have a tool for, or if they appear to solve a set of problems better than my current tool. That's why I've delved so deep into perl, and that's why I use XML::Twig for basically anything XML-ish (including manipulation of XHTML).

As for which of the two to use, I'd go with H::T if you need looping or conditional logic in your templates or C::FT if you don't. (C::FT can do looping to generate tables and such, but you have to use a sub-template for the looped portion, which makes the templates less clear and gets to be a pain to write the code for.)