12-18 months ago our templating system used XSL which was powerful but difficult for non-technical people to work with and some clients had bad experiences.
Since then we've made major changes to our CMS including 2 new version releases with nearly 60 new features and improvements. We also spent a great deal of our own time and money adding a different template system (Smarty). This was done to avoid clients having negative experiences with customizing the templates.
We chose Smarty because it's widely known, tons of people in and out of our industry are familiar with it and it's HTML based which makes it much easier to use.
I'm still confident in saying that you will not find a better system to run your network
AJ