Another problem with includes is that you're calling them once per line, which can be highly inefficient even if it works.
But if you find a solution that works better, please let me know. One possibility might be improving the list-builder template in acs-templating or wherever. It might be possible to fix the banding.
Is it possible to specify a different "style" in the listtemplate tag, similar to the formtemplate tag? It doesn't seem so, and I think I'm looking for a completely different behavior from list-builder.