Back in the day, when templates were first "invented," I thought they were cheating and purposely never used them!
Now it's rare for me to make a page without one.
I used to make lots of super-feminine pages for my daughter when she was little. Now she's almost 11 & no longer interested in princesses and pink and unicorns and flowers (except for reading about them) so the only time I make super-feminine pages is when I'm scrapping myself.
I used to scrap very slowly (see #1) and take a few hours per page which included lots of element clustering. Now my pages take less than an hour & while I have some elements, it's not nearly as many as I used to use.