There is a project to eventually remove those templating dependancies and make them available as separate packages. The work started at last year pycon sprints and can be continued this year, who knows. OTOH having those packages installed in your venv doesn't really affect your app so just avoid using them and only use the JSON renderer or any other renderers. Instead of forking Pyramid and removing those dependancies in setup.py I propose you to join us and work on the removal project so we can all benefit the same features.