Be careful when mocking Template::Toolkit. It's quite powerful, in fact more powerful than it should be - it's a Turing-complete language.

The whole idea of Template (or any comparable renderer, say Text::Xslate, dozens of them) is the separation of logic from presentation - but with a very flexible presentation layer. You just give the templating engine a template and a hash of values - and the engine does the rest. Templates are much easier to edit than general-purpose code. I'm never ever coming back to $form->addElement("foo")->addValue("bar");

Dancer example shows only variable substitution for simplicity, but Template can do way more than that.

• Conditionals with [% IF foo == bar %]...[% END %];
• looping with [% WHILE cond %]...[% END %];
• iterating over data [% FOREACH item IN list %] * [% item | html %];[% END %];
• sanitizing/escaping/trimming strings [% GET username | html %];
• filtering them through predefined perl functions [% FILTER myfunc %]some text here[% END %];
• , inclusion of external files (say headers/footers) [% PROCESS file %] or [% INCLUDE file %] and - last but not least -
• defining your own blocks to avoid boilerplate/repetitions: [% BLOCK foo %]...[% END %] and then [% PROCESS foo option="value" %]

See Template documentation for more examples. I didn't have time to google a comprehensive portfolio though.