use Perl

I'm not sure what your rules are for installing extensions for the framework, but there's a TT renderer for Mojo:

http://search.cpan.org/~abh/MojoX-Renderer-TT-0.31/lib/MojoX/Renderer/TT.pm

(Install it, add the lines from the synopsis to your startup() method and name your templates foo.html.tt).

With Mojolicious::Lite I think it'd be something like

              use MojoX::Renderer::TT;
              my $tt = MojoX::Renderer::TT->build(
                        mojo => app,
              );

              app->renderer->add_handler( tt => $tt );

Most of the "reinventing" is very thoughtfully done - and in surprisingly little code.

The template thing is indeed a little silly; but it's a very simple template module and Mojolicious has extensive support for plugging in other "renderers" (a bunch already exist on CPAN).

It's all trade-offs (of course).

With Catalyst there's a good deal of "having to learn the underlying bits" to really understand what's going on. In Mojo there's less code and it's more internally consistent.

(That being said, I do think it'd be nicer if Mojo used Moose instead of its own very basic base class).

Uh, that's a little unfair. I've been using Mojo since November last year and it from the git log you only put Dancer on github a few weeks ago.

Mojolicious::Lite is just a variant on the Mojolicious code to allow you to have apps in one file, like you have in Dancer. It's not a fork.