You are wrong on all counts here. Salt supports Jinja2 template engine, so you can template your states [1]. You define custom states in python [2]. In the root configuration file (top.sls) you target configuration based on host name, grains (machine specific information) [3].

1 - http://docs.saltstack.com/topics/tutorials/states_pt3.html

2 - http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/writing.htm

3 - http://docs.saltstack.com/ref/states/top.html

That statement is very very wrong. Salt has templates, renderers, grains, while supporting all the data structure languages you can dream of.

In fact, it is the most flexible software I've seen recently.

jinja2 and mako are supported, and you can even write your own renderer without much effort if a templating language is not supported.

There's even a renderer for pure python, allowing one to write config files in python for more control and flexibility.

One wonders if you've ever actually tried Salt. It really is OK to have an approach of: "I like Chef and it works for me." More power to you. Everyone should use the tool that works for them.

Salt has jinja2 templates.