But I can't help noticing that most front-end developers will be relying heavily on rendering a list of items on the page and will require a simple and clean manner to go about this.

Could you go into detail about this use case? For example, would standard HTML elements not be sufficient to render lists?

i think the question centers around how you take a list of data fetched from an API and iterate over it and render it. the only way i see we can do this is in JS with template strings but i don't know how we avoid re-rendering the entire list when we want to just add a new item to the list.

This issue is over a year old, and I don't think it's an area we're actively trying to address with Catalyst. Thanks for the discussion though!