I'd be interested in hearing what you mean about being more abstract, but I think you'll like the simplicity angle.
In general, we build things with the goal of readability by diverse levels of skill and busy-ness -- to make things readable like a book and easy so you don't forget something in Ansible 6 months after you wrote it, and so you can dive in, get something done, and dive out.
We've got some IT managers saying they can tell employees to do X, Y, and Z, and not knowing Ansible, can still read the playbook. So, it should be fine for your freelancer case I'm sure. This is also why there is no graph dependency system, just handlers and notifies, so you can read things top to bottom.
For some reason I tend to prefer the idea of being more "abstract" like Salt is. So my private project (server+vagrant) is being provisioned with Salt. Like borplk i'm interested in opinions of people which have experience with both.