I don't really agree that Terraform re-invents wheels. In fact it feels like a lot of the things you cite as issues are actually due to Terraform being pretty innovative. There's not much like it for "version-controlled" infrastructure, so the team and community are learning as they go, and can't be expected to come up with perfect solutions right away. I agree the looping hacks are very ugly, really dislike the whole split and join everywhere thing.

As for DSL vs. programming languages, the halting problem provides a pretty compelling argument in favor of limiting your system if you want to have "verifiable convergence". Personally I'm a huge fan of HCL too. It fixes a lot of what's bad about YAML and TOML and has a built in pretty printer.