In what way is attribute precedence over-engineered? You can ignore most of it for most cases and just use default for everything, but when you need it, it's there for you. I don't see how it's more or less simple than what Ansible has defined: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#var.... I count 16 precedence rules in Ansible 2.0.

Every time a new configuration management utility comes out, everyone loves it because of it's simplicity or some arbitrary measure of "lightweight," but once Systems Engineers need to solve real automation problems in the real world, they start adopting features to work around the illusion of being "lightweight."

I like Ansible for automating my home network where I have simple problems and no need for environment separation. For professional work, I stick with Chef or Puppet.

It's got a lot of complex rules to memorize, which aren't exactly intuitive either.

I don't think that's a very good example. Attribute precedence is easy to understand, and it's very necessary. After working with it for a bit it becomes very intuitive.

And all of the config management tools have a comparable concept. Ansible 2.0 has 16 levels of variable precedence, Puppet has hiera which gives you arbitrary levels of precedence, and Chef has attributes, of which there are 11-15, depending on how you count.