I love and hate Ansible. It has simplified so many things for me, but also had some annoying bugs and regressions. Somehow I've lost trust in the codebase. Also performance is a showstopper. I need a tool to develop, I just can't wait > 10 min for an iteration. I usually end up modifying my server's config files manually and then build the Ansible templates.

Unfortunately I'm not aware of a better alternative.