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Wouldn't it be kind of trivial to right a function to would take a directory name as a parameter and symlink it from site-available to site-enabled?

It would be. That's exactly what a2ensite does. That's what I ended up doing.

That's a debian feature. Not an Apache feature.

You can also use the Debian-style setup with sites-enabled/*, though I don't know of enable/disable scripts for nginx.