I see that per the jQuery plugin template page that jQuery plugins have gone from beta to deprecated without passing a real release. I can't find any info on jquery.com or their related sites about why. Or when a replacement might be available. Maybe 1.8?
This is very frustrating because my project has made a big investment in jQuery templates. Now it looks like a bad investment and we're looking for something else that is jQuery-based, including JavascriptMVC.
Any better suggestions? I'll be happy to take rationale or other information in the comments, but I'd prefer suggestions as answers.
jQuery Templates are not dead, they just aren't going in as an official template language of the project. The maintainer of that project will likely still make some updates (and has plans to redo quite a bit of it in the future).
JavaScriptMVC is quite a bit more complex than just templates and you can use just about any templating language that you want with it.
Some of the more popular templating languages these days are Mustache/Handlebars, Dust.js, Haml, Embedded JavaScript, and a few others. The first three are actually pretty similar syntax to the jQuery templates with the exception that they don't natively create jQuery object for your element. That's easy to add though.