That's fair! I was considering Ansible for the same reasons but felt that:
1) Ansible on a Mac host is lacking
2) I didn't enjoy setting up Ansible first-thing
3) I hated running around looking up Ansible module docs when I needed to change/fix something
4) I wasn't psyched about writing more YAML
FWIW, the cognitive load of adding another tool here should be fairly low. It mostly leverages tools you're probably already using, and the management of those is still up to you for the most part. The configuration piece is pretty minimal. Write it once and forget about it. There is a CLI surface, but for the most part you can get away with just running `mstrap`.
