It is easy to pick up and do easy tasks. Like installing a package on ubuntu and setup ufw. Then you throw in a few centos hosts and have to write if-else in yaml. Then u try to provision docker and end up with more if-else blocks to install the required python packages. Then you get to the part where you want to provision a database with presistent storage inside a docker container and just give up.

The two things that came into my mind when I first used Ansible was "bash" and "hudson/jenkins".

It seems like a tool which was written by an ops person (as in hacked together) for ops people (who don't mind stuff being hacked together), specifically for replacing manually distributed cryptic bash files. It's an improvement over that, for sure, but that's it.