I wouldn't be so harsh. Both Puppet and Chef come with their own (enterprisey) overhead and it's Yet Another Tool to understand and maintain. Chef in particular feels like an over-engineered solution for anyone managing less than hundreds of servers, it adds a lot of cruft (centralized server, authorization, protocols, etc.) that most people wouldn't need. I believe a lot of people like it for the sole reason they are not experienced managing servers, so they can just use pre-made recipes and call it a day.

Anyway, you can go a long way with just a bunch of scripts leveraging Fabric's API. I have setup ~10 servers for a news portal I run from the ground up in just a few lines of code. Managing dependencies is not ridiculously difficult as you make it sound, package managers (apt-get, pip) already handle that for you without any overhead.