Oooh! Did you just intend to open-up a can of religious worms?

;-)

Well anyway, let me try to set a realistic scenario for you. Fast-forward the time-clock about five years.

“Ooh, did you hear what happened to Roman and his office-mate?”
“Yeah, wasn't that freaky? A tsunami roared-in to their cubicle and they were both just gone! The bread truck that was gonna smoosh them didn't even get into the building!”
“So what's gonna happen to the Perl code they've been maintaining?”
“I dunno.   They understood it, I guess, but nobody else could. The display logic and the decision logic were all so mashed together...”
“Did they ever get started on the international translation issue?”
“You kiddin'?   They were always finding excuses for that... we'll get started real soon now, they always said ... but they knew how many if-statements that would add to their code, so as far as I know they never 'got around to it.'”
“Bummer... by the way, be sure to tell me your "dice.com" user-id so I can use you as a reference.   I'm not gonna get stuck maintaining that dog-pile!”
“You got that right...”

It really does make sense that display and business process are two entirely separate things, and that they should be “entirely separated” as much as possible. This is why Template systems have grown more and more advanced. They do that in order to give the page designer ... the visual designer ... freedom to change the arrangement of a page without affecting the code that produces or processes the data. Sometimes those changes need to be very substantial to properly handle the needs of an entirely different (human) language.

I suggest that you “go with the flow,” because there really is a good reason for it. If you ever allow yourself to become “the only person who really understands how thus-and-so very important application actually works,” your chances for promotion just dropped to zero. And no matter how much you enjoy doing what you're doing now, right now, one day you're going to want to do something else.