custom templates or an alternative?

I am testing atahualpa to see if I can switch to it from graphene and have a flexible theme.

I have some custom php that does things like put up applets, and others that deal with paypal, and because of that I am pretty sure I am in that 1% that needs a child theme, which you kind of dismiss.

I can get the child theme working ok, and can invoke php via widgets, but the method I was using to decide which php functions to call was based on templates for certain pages. There are a number of similar pages that need to run the same php functions, and templates fit that requirement very well.

However, with atahualpa, trying to use templates is getting all kinds of errors. I tried including template_multi_column_custom_query.php into my template, that broke a loop somewhere so I got no content, and clearly atahualpa is not designed to be used that way.

Are there other alternatives that you can suggest ?

I don’t use page id’s, thought about keying off page names, but that seems like a maintenance headache. I am not married to templates, but they do seem like the right model.

Thanks for anything you can suggest.