I'm not sure why you'd hate the template language. Its deliberate dumbness can be tiresome, but on the other hand, if you're running into that, it's a code smell. I was sceptical about the whole "designed for designers" aspect of it - but I've had to introduce a couple of people, one of whom isn't a developer, to Jekyll at work, with the Liquid templates which are very similar syntactically, and it's been picked up very quickly.
I keep hearing it's slow, but I haven't had to run at a scale that it's a pain point, so I wouldn't know.
Its deliberate dumbness was a good idea that does not get enough credit. You should not be doing complex logic in the template layer.
I still think it could be made more user friendly for designers, though. We need some sort of app that will autofill django templates' context variables with test data so that designers can see how it all looks and edit them under different circumstances without having to deal with the messiness or state of the system underneath.
I keep hearing it's slow, but I haven't had to run at a scale that it's a pain point, so I wouldn't know.