Indeed I always liked Ansible, but the input format does occassionally get a little awkward. They've basically designed their own simple language semantically, but they constrained it to be expressed with the syntax of a data serialization language.

I think the choice of YAML is because Ansible is supposed to be declarative and a serialization format makes sense there, but some of the "metaprogramming" features they've layered on top like loops can feel a bit strange. Like I said I still like it, but I do feel occasionally that it might be nice to have another frontend that is more like a proper programming language.