We're using Catalyst to render lots of webforms in what will become a large application. I don't like the way all the form data is confusingly into a big hash in the Controller, before being passed to the template. It seems jumbled up and messy for the template. I'm sure there are real disadvantages that I haven't described properly... Are there?

One solution is to just decide on a convention for the hash, e.g.:

{
  defaults => {
    type => ['a', 'b', 'c']
  },
  input => {
    type => 'a'
  },
  output => {
    message => "2 widgets found of type a",
    widgets => [ 'foo', 'bar' ]
  }
}

Another way is to store the page/form data as attributes in a class (a ViewModel?), and pass a whole object to the template, which it could use like this:

<p class="message">[% model.message %]<p>

[% FOREACH widget IN model.widgets %]

Which way is more flexible for large applications?

Are there any other solutions or existing Catalyst-compatible frameworks?