I agree that we'll all disagree on templating systems. :) I use
HTML::Embperl (I'm using 1.3.6) extensively and find it very useful, particularly in regards to automatically building tables and forms from a database. It did take a while to get it set up because it really likes mod_perl and because you will want to determine which session management system to add to your Apache.
I used to do a lot of PHP, but not any more. There are too many Perl-specific modules out there that are goldarned indispensible when you're doing anything more than just
print <blah>ing a web page.
