I don't agree it is subpar. I have a fairly long list of reasons for preferring CF over Terraform. I agree on combining CF with Ansible though. My recipe is to wrap a CF template in an Ansible role. It makes for a versioned chunk of automation that composes well with my other roles, including ones that are not CF based. Plus I can do non-CF setup tasks using any Ansible module, and even run tests, to get pretty much full end-to-end automation for a given stack. I haven't found a way to get the same degree of power and flexibility from Terraform without resorting to writing custom plugins.