Great explanation Nik, this is something I think the MODX community in general still haven't grasped. I am working on some Twig integration which I will probably do a core version in a fork of MODX just for Experimental use. It is said too often that designers don't like logic in template, but designers don't make templates anyway (besides designing them). Frontend developers make template, as since most are familiar with JavaScript they would have to create logic of some sort anyway.
I will share this on Twitter and hope others will understand the useful of having logic in templates, rather than a bunch of parsers parsing Snippets/Chunks and Templates.