I'm not entirely sure if specifically underscore's templating would help.  You still end up with the ridiculousless of typing html strings into javascript variables.  The only thing underscore's template will net you is being able to inject code through the compile().

The way its made here is closer to backbone's templating system without all its setup.  I honestly would prefer to use a sprawled out framework that pollutes our source tree.

Otherwise, I completely agree with you that readability is a problem if you're not familiar with what I'm trying to do.