after discussing with Ali, we decided that encapsulating the "template" from the Left Panel is not a good idea because we lose the ability to use the AngularJS automatic binding. We would have ended up writing a lot of code to glue that UI to our model (i.e. template).
In this change, i revert back my changes to the Left Panel and simply pass a reference to the "template" ( i called it privateTemplate to avoid name collisions)
Now things should be working as before ( no regressions on the Left Panel)