When I wrote Freedom is Power, I was pissed off because of the extra work of extracting all the info into the context for Django’s templating system doesn’t support enough logic. You have to create many little variables to be inserted only once in the template, while you could have just passed the model instance itself. Coding and maintenance becomes harder.
I have done some thinking over this but I am still not sure. If you’re doing both the views and templates yourself then it can be overkill. Just like static typing, or public/private/protected discrimination. On the other hand for design-heavy projects, where there is a seperate template designer who doesn’t know/care much about programming it makes sense. Still the possibility of having adequate presentation logic in templates is a good thing. It shouldn’t hurt anyone.
Last week (jinja dev) Armin Ronacher has posted an article named “Why Jinja is not Django and why Django should have a look at it“. It is a comprehensive comparison of internal workings of both templating engines. Inevitably it is a little biased, but I think each argument is valid and important. If you are into Django, it is a good read. There is also some speed comparison to back it up.
I am currently working on a project using Django. But I don’t touch the templating engine for this one. Everything served as JSON. 
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