This is great. I've found myself frustrated by the Liquid templating system, though. For instance, the print was inserting a line break that was messing with meta tags on my website.
Could you speak more about the things you dislike in Liquid? It's one of my favorite templating systems, especially if you're treating it in the same way as you would mustache templates, i.e., using a view-model or decorator to prep data from a model. If you're using a lot of `assign` or `capture` tags, it's horrible.
I wonder if the reason you were having trouble with Liquid is that you were using it incorrectly. It's definitely meant to be secure over simple. Was the issue you were having a bug or did you find a way to fix the encoding?