Thanks, honestly, that was my personal preference intervening too, the goal was to use something that allowed you to drop logic into a template (yup, that's a bad practice but it's a hackathon, so who cares?) and didn't scare of someone potentially unfamiliar with template languages (as you mentioned Jade is very different from HTML at first glance).

If you find anything else you think would be useful, let me know. I've got my eye on https://github.com/stephenplusplus/grunt-bower-install as a means of quickly dropping script tags in, and I think some method for simple heroku / aws deployment might be handy too.