I must admit that I'm having real problems getting this to work. I'm a little hazy on some of the template syntax used here (and the documentation doesn't seem to explain it).
What does adding empty square brackets to a variable do?
That looks a lot more like what I understand. "Learn PHP" is unfortunately still on my todo list...
As a matter of interest I managed to make the template work using the sequence array method too. I'd be interested to know if you think this is worse, or more inefficient, than your method. I might put both into the documentation as comments in the Matrix section - save myself a lot of time when I need to do this again!