[saryant]

We use the templates to render email messages on the server primarily.

Note that Play doesn't force you to use the templates, you can plug in your own very easily or forgo them entirely and just push JSON out for client-side rendering.

We use that for monitoring our backend Akka cluster: Play streams JSON using server-sent events to the client for rendering Mustache.js templates.

I don't know the exact motivation for including compiled templates (we love them) but in practice Play is perfectly happy either way.