It has been. Seems most people write one of their own at some point.

I found the OP's suggestion appealing because it sounds like a solution that wouldn't require me to install some interpreter, a bunch of supporting libraries and tools, write my templates in some custom template language, custom configuration language, scripts, yadda, yadda.

It would be nice to have a system that ran as a unix-y daemon or cron job that just took a single dot-file and did everything for you.