You've just echoed my experience with chef but I'm still on the fence as to whether I think it was a success or not and whether I'd use it again. We were able to achieve everything we wanted but to say it took a metric fuckton of time would be a grave understatement. Even what are ordinarily trivial things took a lot longer than I expected. Some things I just found to be oddly designed and surprisingly inflexible, especially the recipe construct. I still to this day see no point of having a folder with 2 subfolders with 3 files combined for what amounts to "apt get install somepackage". And having to learn a DSL to replace the already very effective bash is in my opinion not a very enticing trade.

Although it's very new, I think I'll try out juju.ubuntu.com for my next large deployment instead of sticking with chef or puppet, if only for the flexibility of the hooks-in-any-language thing and a chance to feed my bash fetish.