I think you are missing the point of templating engines. The point of using something like Smarty (at least /my/ reason for using it) is not so you can have yet another programming language, but that it is separation of view from model and content. In essence, the template is the V in MVC.

I don’t mind designers playing with Views, but I really don’t want them messing with the Controllers and Models. Smarty and other templating engines are good because designers can use plain HTML with a /minimum/ of code to data variables.

The articles you mentioned argue that templating engines are largely useless because they go beyond simple templating and add programmatic abilities as well. I agree with that. If you need to create an “if” conditional, then you should probably be doing it in the controller, and not in the view.

However, just because Smarty allows you to do X, Y and Z, does not mean you should ignore it just because you only need X. If you don’t need Y and Z, then don’t use them.

check it out
http://www.phppatterns.com/docs/design/templates_and_template_engines
http://massassi.com/php/articles/template_engines/