Man, I am really happy that playbook parsing and error reporting has been improved.

Almost all the frustrations I have had with ansible haven't been from individual modules, but from the mini-language in playbooks defining what modules gets run when with what input variables. Almost pushed me to do away with playbooks entirely and just call ansible modules from a python script directly.

I think the reason they didn't use a procedural language is because they specifically wanted to keep the playbooks declarative.

Ideally, the playbook should describe the state you want the system to be in.

This is 'almost' the case for most modules and I think this was a very good design decision.

Having said that, the ghastly YAML format was almost a deal-breaker for me too.