@mosaster I can say three things about that:
- I use Hugin only for re-projecting single images, not for stitching, because after several attempts I found that to be far too slow and cumbersome. I’m not familiar with optimal solutions to using templates in Hugin. But I want to support floss software whenever I can, so the next time I do stitching I will give Hugin 2017.0 another shot - hopefully it has improved with age. I want to add that I do love the control point placer/magnifier in Hugin, it’s very well made and effective.
- Using templates generally requires that you use a precise pano head, typically a robotic one. You wrote, referring to your panoramas, that “most of them are similar”, so the question is what does “similar” mean. Generating new control points should lead to better results and should only take several seconds, so I do that every time despite using a precise pano head (“precise” is relative anyway). As for your yaw/pitch/roll question, are you asking about that for individual images, or for the whole pano? If for the latter, then Hugin has a fast OpenGL viewer/editor using which you can change yaw/pitch/roll numerically or just by click-dragging the preview with the mouse.
- The “other solution” I mentioned before runs just fine in Linux - I made sure of that by being actively involved in testing bug reporting for many years.