Lot of the features you built over the years were built in tools like capistrano or fabric. Any particular reason on why not use them in the first place?
I've been doing an eval for a new environmental auditing tool at work, and I've found that most of the pre-built solutions out there (e.g. Ansible Tower, Chef Server, some tools that we have written internally) will mostly meet our needs with some coercion, but I decided we should write our own anyway because it gives us the flexibility to only use and maintain the features we're actually going to use.
It's very possible (likely, even) that the Reddit guys looked at fabric or capistrano, and decided either:
1) the tool didn't map to their model of deployments, or 2) the tool did too much and would require more maintenance than a dead-simple solution they wrote themselves.
It's all a matter of perspective.