I am not ashamed to admit that I felt the same way for a time. I don't know when things changed, but it started to click recently, and I actually like yaml. I guess that it helps that it has become rather ubiquitous in our build tools between cloud-init, puppet hieradata, and ansible roles/playbooks.

What hasn't been helpful is what others here and elsewhere have reminded me time and time again... "JSON is a subset of yaml"

The documentation is actually quite good!

http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html

They provide a huge amount of examples, and YAML is actually I think a lot more powerful than most folks realize.

Initially I was that way too, only took a couple weeks and a few reference templates that demonstrated the constructs to get past that and haven't done JSON since. Definitely more efficient to develop with.