Mathematically, it might be fine, but the logic in such a variant suffers greatly. Due to matching one's own template preferences with those of the tournament organizer, a player gains an unfair advantage when playing as black.

One could also say that in a Jebus Cross tournament, preference is given to those who prefer and play a lot of Jebus Cross) On one hand, that's correct, but that's how it should be. If a player plays a template outside the organizer's list a lot, they will have some opportunity to play it by specifying it. If they play and like a template from the list a lot, then, imho, they should have a higher probability of playing it, rather than specifying a potentially non-preferred template for themselves.

ed. Sorry, I didn't see the part about the "empty" template; this is one way to solve this minor "problem".