> I dont know chef but puppet has become more and more complicated over the years chasing the more advanced use cases and in many ways thats moved it away from a tool for sysadmins towards a being a tool for specialists so I think Ansibles outlook makes more sense. YMMV.

Yeah, I concur. There aren't too many cases where I can't work around the lack of programmability with some creative templates or what-have-you.

(I wonder if I could render an Ansible task file from a template and then include it...)