Meh, I think this somewhat misses the point of TeX, to be honest. Yes, the dream is you just give it content and it lays it all out. No, in reality that doesn't necessarily happen. In reality, TeX can cover many of the well defined choices for you, but you still have to iterate on the content and some commands to TeX to get what you really want.

That is, using this template is probably a fine tool to use in the process of creating documents. Just as I doubt that Tufte really arranged the kerning of every character. (Maybe he did... unfortunately my copies haven't traveled with me yet.)