The trend of "stick together Yaml and a template engine, we have our DSL!" in CM sytems is a bit horrible.
Ansible does make some efforts to limit jinja templating to variable substitution, but it's sill not that great, you have all kinds of weird stuff that can happen specially with colons.
The worst one is saltstack, the resulting syntax is just atrocious and border line unreadable, I not a big fan of map.jinja files[0] and on the yaml side, things can get ugly quite fast [1].
I know it's not a popular opinion, but I would rather use the puppet DSL, even with its step learning curve.
The whole concept of templating language on top of YAML is suspect anyway, but I wish Salt had just gone with Mako as the default templating language. That way you could write plain Python in your templates and not have this horrible misuse of Jinja.
I also have come to agree that a DSL is the best solution, though Puppet's particular DSL is not a great example. Projects that re-implement the same thing from scratch like mgmt[1] are on the right track, but probably won't gain enough traction.
