I partly considered not writing the original post because this thought crossed my mind as well -- I think that it IS a problem with ECS because just about every other S3 object was easy to create and consistent when I would apply the configurations. The ECS Service just seemed to be less stable.
Also, I was using the AWS code SDK to build a little deploy script and it actualy worked really great. The reason I can't use a third party tool like terraform is because I can't force the rest of the team to learn about it (similarly why I can't use kubernetes)