I agree with you - but I wasn't gonna slam it.

I'm starting to dig Seaside - a Squeak based web app server - it uses continuations to basically stash a copy of the app in a given state mapped to various unique urls. Makes backtracking more straightforward to deal with (data persistence to a rdbms is another thing).

It uses a builder pattern with lots of CSS support to provide page layout. No templates. The designers of the framework have been batting around how they want to layout UIs and templates were tossed in favor of design components - via builders or maybe adding a visual editor.

Seaside has a page that implements a Smalltalk browser - on the local machine it feels about as fast as Squeak's GUI - and you don't have to switch windows. Thats pretty hard to beat.