It's easy to write a template. But the challenges of the architecture around templates reveal themselves very quickly, especially once you begin to consider using templates both on the client and in Node.js. Even an off-the-shelf framework that handles that for you may at some point need to be extended, and that requires thinking about what you need from a template before and after the HTML it renders. A template, once you really start to use it, is a lot more than just a way to produce some HTML.