Not necessarily anything having to do with lower brackets, but IMO templates sucked because it disallowed customization of your character. Want to stack more crit as a Fire Mage? Blizzard says you’re locked at 30% (just as an example).
Also they didn’t tend to them. Perhaps if they actually did balance them often it would have been different. With Templates it was easy to see the real issue is class balance and tuning.
e: Also, an otherwise useless white ring was BiS since templates were dependent on ilvl