kde-base/kapptemplate is a collection of scripts and header files that make it easier to set up an autotooled project. It should not RDEPEND on anything besides bash. In fact, it probably should not DEPEND on much either. Yet currently, through some kind of eclass magic, kapptemplate pulls in kdelibs and qt, among other things. This matters because there apparently exist some applications (e.g. divxcalc [in the sunrise overlay] which I am trying to fix so it builds properly) that use scripts from kapptemplate but do not depend on kdelibs. Given the choice between 1. forcing users to compile kdelibs unnecessarily; 2. adding giant patches containing all relevant scripts from recent kapptemplate to the packages that need them; or 3. fixing the kapptemplate dependencies it would seem 3 is the best solution.
I talked with scarabeus and he said that we have the same issue for oxygen-icons for kde4. We can't fix this, as all kde-base ebuilds have some basic deps like kdelibs. You can try some dirty hacks like --nodeps