"In fact, the point of managing state is to react to the changing state of different resources (ie. services in a service-oriented architecture, the physical or virtual systems they run on, the networks that connect them, etc.) and to automatically resolve failures through known and tested state-migrations."

They should be part of the definition of your system (ie the state), not changed on the fly.

If I said ShutIt was elegant, I was wrong (not sure where I did). It's not elegant, just as the real world is not.

Anyone trying to make config management look elegant is selling you a pup.