TAL does have a downside- as do all the other templating languages - they've all alllowed feature creep to turn them into micro-languages or processing languages.
I wouldn't necessarily say that's a bad thing - sometimes the view does have to be more complicated, and if your templating language isn't up to it then you end up inter-mingling code and HTML.
Another vote here for Catalyst, we're running web sites for around 18 regional UK newspapers using it. Amongst the models we use DBIx::Class for DB access, and for view TT.
Carl
