I agree with you but I think that dumb + size => complicated which is where I live. When you have a playbook that is thousands of tasks long the dumbness leads to exactly the problem you have with Python.
I agree with that! my ansibles are for really straight stuff deployed to a few boxes. Where I work, oddly enough at Red Hat :), the very large playbooks are definitely difficult to work with. It's hard to say though if a custom Python app of similar size is really any better though, unless your developers are Michelangelo.
it's like the dumbness of Ansible is really the main feature it has.