So here is the big change that required the DRY discussion.  Basically I needed to create a backlog only column and then a repeat with one column for each tag/label for the kanban.  When I set out to do that I didn't want to have a bunch of repeated markup in the template so I looked at how to split off the commonality for the cards into their own template and controller.

You can see that there is still come repeated stuff in here because I didn't (yet?) split out a column into it's own template.  That could be another improvement to try to get in here if it would be useful.