Great input from all commentators and clearly this is an area that many have opinions on like
Regarding Mustache and Handlebars; the basic idea is that templates should be logic-free - despite this, there are many question at Stackoverflow, on how to add intelligence when using these templating engines. The basic idea and real-life implementation doesn't add up...
Templating solutions such as Mustache and Handlebars falls short when the need to add intelligence to the template. In such cases, the template needs to extended with helper functions, which leads to scattered templating.
Another way to implement smart templates is to use XSLT, which is both standardized as well as longtime proven. XSLT is used commonly used with XML but with DefiantJS, it's trivial to transform JSON structures with XSL (additionally, it's possible to search JSON structures with XPath queries using this lib; http://defiantjs.com/#xpath_evaluator).