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> It mostly works!

> When it doesn’t, it generally fails in a useful way, and then I can fix it and try again.

This is the "killer feature" for me when comparing Terraform and CloudFormation. I know they've been working on making CF better, but the way Terraform handles errors (and allows you to pick up from where you left off, instead of waiting around for stuff to roll back) is a lot better suited to tight experimentation and feedback loops.

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I think this feature lends itself well to tight feedback loops, as you said. However, after I crossed the painful divide from CloudFormation novice to... well, whatever is after that, CloudFormation rollbacks became a friend instead of an enemy. The ability to return to the last known good checkpoint is a powerful feature that is extremely useful in production systems and the pipelines that deploy them. In those scenarios, you're not experimenting and learning, but enhancing and evolving existing infrastructure.

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