My guess is that it's because learning a different paradigm is difficult and you don't see its benefits until you're proficient with it. It's like learning func

My guess is that it's because learning a different paradigm is difficult and you don't see its benefits until you're proficient with it. It's like learning functional or logic programming. Ansible gives you merely a way to execute commands on remote servers. Much touted idempotency is not a game changer, it's quite easy to achieve even if you write everything yourself. CFEngine requires a different mindset, you need to (a) think of the servers running independently and (b) configure groups (classes) of servers, not individual servers, even grouped in a list of some kind, like Ansible works. Suddenly an environment becomes much easier to manage.