I thought he might have meant that, but I never had too much difficulty doing this through the Django template API.

It's not bad, but the Jinja2 language is more expressive, and the API is a bit better. Not enough we would migrate away from Django templates to it, but enough to not migrate away from Jinja.

Fair enough, I tend to use something very restrictive like Django templates (I made/use an Erlang port of the language as well: https://github.com/oinksoft/dtl) or something very flexible like Mako if I have the choice and need it.