Try #supertorrents
Provide figures. I stand unconvinced that Smarty uses way too "many" resources.
I couldn't find any studies or whatnot done on it but as far as theory goes, caching the smarty requests to the harddrive (as smarty does) makes the application more IO dependant, which is one of the bigger problems with the current system.
I'm trying to make it as lightweight (but feature-rich) as possible.
Maybe it's all in my head, smarty = rails, and I hate rails. I also don't see the need for a ginormous chunk of code devoted to aspects of templating that I'll never need.