I'm surprised that the "nothing complex / hack up a quick prototype" recommendation is Angular. I get that it's powerful, but there's so much deep magic inside angular [1] that I find even simple stuff takes significant forethought and wrangling.

As a substitute, why not Ractive.js? It's simple and does what you'd expect. You put

    {{#each foo:i}}
       <span class="{{classname}}"> {{foo[i]}} </span>
    {{/each}}

in one place, and

    ractive.set({
        foo: ['a', 'b', 'c'],
        classname: "output",
    })

in another, and things just work. No messing with insanity like:

    angular.element(myDomElement).scope().$apply();

/rant. Maybe I'm missing something deep here.

[1] Introspecting the parameter names of the callback function I passed in? Really?