This is pretty much where I'm at. By the time you bolt back in everything that Ansible removes "for simplicity" because you realize that, hey, you stepped on that rake and would like to not step on it again, you've more or less reinvented Chef with YAML (I forget who around here called YAML the new S-expressions, but it's uncomfortably true) instead of a usable programming language as your DSL. The overwhelming volume of the community (edit: I called them "fanboys" before, and that's not fair; I think they're unreasonable but I'm not in their heads) makes me wonder at times whether or not it's trying to ignore picking the slower horse by being really enthusiastic about it.

My current client paid me to drop Ansible and rewrite the experimental Ansible service in Chef, and it's under half the lines of committed code in our repo and they don't have to deal with the bogus state of Ansible dependency management.