Was there any thought to perhaps do a version with an agent? I really like how fast Saltstack can be as compared to Ansible.

I've been using my own homegrown project that does just this - Python roles, server/client, Mako templates: https://github.com/mattbillenstein/salty

It's very very fast to do deploys on long-lived infrastructure, but it hasn't been optimized for large clusters yet; I expect the server process will be a bottleneck with many clients, but still probably faster than Ansible for most setups.