I build releases with distillery and deploy them with Docker, the combination has worked really nicely for my projects.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of exrm and distillery, so I'm probably biased.

I don't see why it should be painful. What were the issues you were facing?

I found that besides hot-code updates, there is not as much magic as one could think, and once you "grasp" the idea of a build machine, it should be pretty straigt-forward. Throw in an HAProxy for rolling deploys and you have a sweet zero-downtime solution!

Feel free to contact me if you need someone to help out (from some free general tips and tricks to supporting your team as a consultant).